You only have one Monday, don’t fool yourself into thinking you have two
Elon Musk leveraged a resource from his space exploration company (SpaceX) in order to launch a car from his electric automotive company (Tesla) into orbit.
How does that happen? The short answer is I don’t know, but it makes me think that Elon Musk doesn’t keep a calendar for work and a calendar for home.
How is launching a car into space related to calendars? It’s obvious that Elon Musk doesn’t silo the different aspects of his life — his longing to chill on Mars isn’t independent from his longing to send an electric autonomous vehicle cross country. In other words, he enables one area of his life to impact others and I think the ability to blur those lines is really healthy.
Most people don’t masterfully run 3 companies (don’t forget about SolarCity), but everyone does run their career and their personal lives and understanding how to master both is challenging. And, it’s even more challenging to find ways in which you can apply lessons from one to the other.
One really good way to simultaneously prioritize your career and personal life is to keep one calendar (make events private if you don’t want your co-workers knowing about your midday haircut). You only have one Monday so keeping a calendar with two distinct Mondays on it doesn’t make any sense. The best way to maximize any given day is to prioritize all of the things you have to get done that day on one list — and keeping one calendar affords that.
I am lucky enough to work at a company that genuinely wants me to spend time with my family and also expects me to perform at high level. The benefit of that is that my team knows that I will be able to balance running to school one morning for a play and still get to that pressing email. Therefore, I keep one calendar…haircuts and all.
How about applying learnings from work to home and from home to work? Broaden home to include the books you read, coffee with friends, events you attend and it becomes a little easier to understand how you can apply those learnings.
I’ll often review my calendar at the beginning and end of each week to see what I accomplished. Keeping one calendar has enabled me to see the intersection between work/home and gives me a fuller view of how I am spending my time. Try it…
Originally published at medium.com