Pareto’s law has always fascinated me how a few items always contribute to a large share of the impact. The law is also known as the 80-20 rule. That 20% of the items contribute to 80% of the result of the group. For nearly a decade I’ve been keep measurements of my own activities and for the coaching relationships I have with business leader and I have found this to be uncannily true in areas as diverse as key clients and their impact on business to time spent on a few activities that have a disproportionately large effect on leader productivity.
Personally for me and for the people I coach nowhere has the Pareto’s principle been more important than in the area of work life balance. Put simply, a small amount of time spent on a few activities at the right time greatly increases the feeling that one’s life is in balance: I call this the golden hour phenomenon.
I came across this for the first time during an extended stay in Toronto in the summer months. If you’ve travelled to the higher latitudes or remember your geography lesson- you know that closer to the poles the day night distribution is quite unequal (unlike the tropics). In winter the days are shorter and in summers the days are longer, if you put the numbers they get daylight from 530 in the morning till 9 at night- an amazing 15 plus hours of daylight. After these lessons in geography and Pareto’s let me tell you about my experience. Usually I would settle in for dinner or unwind at home at the end of the day, in Toronto however I found that after about 30 minutes of coming home I used to get going instead of settling in. I was getting a lot more done: I exercised more regularly, went out with family , caught up over a beer with friends, in short I used to be really happy by the time I wound up for the night and got more done. In the course of many months- I found I hadn’t missed a day in exercise, caught up with all friends and family was current on my reading and all the movies I wanted to watch. That hadn’t happened since college- I had stumbled upon the elusive BALANCE. At first it was easy to brush off this to a few environmental factors like: higher productivity levels in North America, greater respect for personal time and an unusual concentration of social events in the summer months of a really cold country like Canada. But there was more…
I started to make measurements, time logs of how I was spending my time in the day and compared it with my data from Delhi, India and found something interesting. I wasn’t working longer or shorter hours, my co-workers were just as productive (an unscientific study of follow ups and time overruns) and the events in Delhi in any given month were just as many. I wasn’t any better but I was doing more: I stumbled on a hypothesis- I had more hours of daylight at home in Toronto in those summer months; an average of 2 hours of daylight every day. Once I had unwound after the workday- it was still daylight outside- the possibility of what I could do with the rest of the evening were alive and beckoning and I simply acted. Someone said “nothing ever happens unless you create a space for it to happen”- the 2 hours of daylight at home gave me just that a lot of space that I could fill in with activities more meaningful than watching the TV.
In daylight the possibilities of what you can do are endless; I imagine there is some evolutionary hardwiring at play here about synchronizing life with daylight that was working for me here. I had to put this hypothesis to the test in Delhi (with its 13 hours of summer daylight) too for me to separate correlation from causation. I decided I would end my workday at 5 in Delhi- no matter what. As you can imagine this decision did not go down well in office – so we settled in for a compromise: I would come in early on Wednesday at 7:30am and leave at 5pm, except if there was a business emergency that day. The experiment produced similar results; on Wednesday so I had time to get a lot more done at the end of work as I had daylight till 7-7:30 in the summers. I caught up with my friends, books I wanted to read, met the people wanted to, exercised more and was a lot happier. The flip side was my driving commute to work shrunk from 2 hours to 1 hour- one extra hour a day.
This worked in India in the summers, how about the Delhi winters with only 10 hour of daylight and the longer Indian business day? This was a bit tricky to do as I had to target starting work by 8am, not an easy thing to do when it is 6 degrees outside- but balance was never going to be easy. This also presented a challenge as I had to get buy in and self-control to end work by 4 pm giving me one and a half hours of daylight. Even then the hypothesis of the golden hour stood valid.
My final hypothesis: The one hour of daylight at home at the end of the day has a disproportionate effect on work life satisfaction. In that one hour is where I found the time to read, meet friends, catch up on exercise, and go out in the town – all the things that contributed to my happiness outside of work. I’ve share this hypothesis with many others over the years and the results have been similar. I encourage you to give it a try : start your day early and try to reach home with one hour of daylight left. As in everything else in life: start gradually- pick one day of the week (Wednesday’s are a good choice) and ask your collaborators at work. Once this works for you start to add more days every week with the permission of your collaborators. Getting better at work!
Rohit Rajput (Advisor) Director, Crestcom Delhi
Image credits: (Allard Schager)
