The Great Balancing Act

Over the last fortnight, for the first time in my short career span of 1 year 4 months, I have had to work on weekends and on festive holidays- as I write this, I am currently taking a break from replying to emails in a bid to retain my sanity. I guess this may be a standard operating procedure for many jobs, but my work has never demanded such a schedule. Up until now. Having experienced it, I can safely say that :

1. It does not make me feel all-important and invaluable if I am woken up from my sleep and told that I need to get cracking on a report or the world will end even before 12/12/12.
2. If someone offers me higher compensation in return for my weekend peace of mind, I wouldn't even bother replying - I would walk away, shaking my head, Gangnam style.

The truth is that I can stay at office for over 10 hours on a weekday and work like a machine that's evolving into a sophisticated Transformer creature. But the moment I step away from a weekday, I switch off. Or for that matter, if I know that it is a declared holiday and all I am doing is sitting at home in my pajamas, I would still run around the house a million times - in an attempt to waste time before I commit the cardinal sin of 'Logging in'.

When we begin our careers, we have a thousand notions of what would or would not matter to us - it is only over a period of time, after being exposed to multiple scenarios, that we can really grasp what is of utmost priority to us. Experts say that it is imperative to have a job that we love but if that 'love' makes it difficult to tear myself away from it, wouldn't I be better off with a job I adored less? While we evolve in our personal spaces, all of us undergo a professional evolution process as well - where we discover ourselves over and over again.And I would disagree with Darwin here and say that in the professional world, it is not about the 'survival of the fittest' but the 'survival of the one who understand his/her priorities well and makes choices accordingly'. You could be earning a salary of 55 lakhs a year but if work-life balance is your greatest motivator and your weekends feel more hectic than your weekdays, you are hardly fit to be happy. You could survive but living would be out of the question.

Every time someone mentions the term work-experience, I do not think about the number of years that an individual has spent in an office or on different assignments. I think about the professional journey that that person has undertaken and all the self-learning obtained. Experience drives confusion away and at the end of it all, if you can identify your own needs with a little more certainty, that would makes you richer. And that's a retirement benefit that you can live on for the rest of your life.