One of my favorite Magic: The Gathering cards of all time is called Balance. It has an incredible effect on the board, it is aggessively costed, and the art is iconic: a knight holding a tipping scale. The cards intent is to “Balance” the game state by equalizing lands, creatures, and cards in hand. But as the designers of the game soon discovered, Balance is a very difficult state to achieve. The card was eventually banned from most formats in the game for being incredibly overpowered, and just like the iconic card, even today, Magic designers have a difficult time balancing out the power level of cards.
Shift perspective to my life, and I find myself suddenly sympathetic. I work from home now, and I live from home, and I do basically everything else from home. I’m at a very homey stage in my life. I also share my home with Jenny. We live together. For the first time in my life, my work is now mixed with my normal life. When I was a waiter, I’d clock out every night and walk away, leaving all the troubles of work in some other mystical land to be forgotten until the next time I had to go clock in. Now the lines are very very very blurred. When does work begin? Basically, when I wakeup at sit at my computer. When does work end? That previous time plus about eight hours. BUT, sometimes we add nine hours. Sometimes seven. My work day is a sort of amorphous power struggle between deadlines and hours in the day. This blurring of barriers has me very confused. Sometimes, at night, I watch TV with Jenny and mere feet away is work. Problem solving, deadlines, clients, coworkers, and programming, stress and satisfaction… all mere feet away. Two meters even.
But there’s more. Work isn’t as boring as it used to be when I was a waiter. Work involves problem solving, work involves math, work involves computers. We all know how much I like my computers, and how much I like problem solving, and how much I like my math. So sometimes I let the gaze of work distract me more often then I should. Sometimes I answer an email, I read up on a javascript technique, or I attempt to debug an error long after work hours have officially past. NEVER in my latter days would I have taken a mans order in the middle of my time off. It wouldn’t happen. But tonight I was caught out. I sat there, watching a funny, engaging show with my funny, engaging girlfriend, and without really thinking about it I lifted my Blackberry and responded to an Email. Shame on me! I need to get a handle on myself before I lose control. I’d hate to awaken from a daze years from now and realize I was one of those guys who ignored the real world to get a little more work done. That isn’t me! I need to come to grips with the constant invasion of technology surrounding me before my home life suffers. I aim to do it too. Just you wait and watch. I will not be one of those guys….
Balance!