 A teeter-totter is nothing more than really a long, thin board with a pivot point in the middle. That's it. A point in the middle exactly between both ends. If you've ever sat on a teeter-totter, I want you to think about that time maybe if you were a kid. You get to the playground maybe with a sister, a brother, a friend, and somebody says, let's get on the teeter-totter and you run over and you get on and you're pushing off the ground into the air and you rise up to the top and it feels so tall. Because you're a kid. It feels like you've achieved something. It feels like you've gotten way high up into the air, but you had to work to get there. You had to push off the ground really hard to get there depending on the size of your friend. But then once you got to the top, you could relax and just ride back down because the other end of the teeter-totter, somebody else was doing the work to get back up to the top. A teeter-totter is really just a lever. It uses weight and effort to create energy. A teeter-totter is what we're going to talk about today in the context of work-life balance. A teeter-totter, its natural state is not in balance. Have you ever gone to a park and found a teeter-totter and it's flat? No! It doesn't exist like that. Its natural state is not in balance. Balance is not natural for this type of play. It is always the opposite. When you get on a teeter-totter and you're having the most fun, it's not because you both got on and you're sitting there flat. It's because you got on and it's going up and down. There's give and there's take. There's movement. Balance is the absolute most boring, most terrible part of riding a teeter-totter. It's awful. But when you look at life in context, like we are today, we're talking about the challenge of trying to achieve work-life balance. Everybody talks about getting to this miraculous nirvana point in life of having balance. But it's really the crappiest part of life. If you get on a teeter-totter and you try to get it balanced, the only way you can do that is to stand in the direct middle. Right above the pivot point, right above the fulcrum. And it's hard. You're balancing, you're standing there, one movement and you're going to tip too far and fall off one way. One movement, you're going to tip too far and fall off the other way. It's work the whole time and it's hard work. And while you're trying to maintain balance, everything else is working against you because it's not the natural state. It wants to go one way or the other. That part where you're standing in the middle and you're working is the grind. It's a lot of times the grind that we're feeling every day. So today, we're talking about our life in terms of looking at it as a teeter-totter. I don't believe that work-life balance is anything that you should aim for. I tried and failed. The worst years ever in my life and my business weren't that long ago. I tried really, really hard to find a good spot in balance. I have two kids, work with my husband, needed to achieve work-life balance. But at the time I was working so hard to get there and to achieve that, I was the most unhappy with both. We're not spending any time together as a couple, as a family. We're working too hard. And over here, I don't like the business that I started. I don't like the clients that I have. I don't like the projects that I'm working on that I want to quit. You get to that point where you're tired of the daily grind. You're grinding so hard and working so hard, but we get to sometimes a point where you feel like, I'm failing at making my business a priority because when I focus on family, things start slipping through the cracks or my pipeline drives up. Or you say, if I'm focusing too much on my business then my spouse feels neglected, or my kids feel neglected, or I have parent guilt. And then I start feeling like I'm a bad parent. And it's trying to stay in the middle of that teeter-totter and keep it perfectly balanced is the most awful, stressful feeling ever. So if you embrace the fact that life should operate like a teeter-totter with work and life at each end, immediately you're going to release some of that stress. Because sometimes work has to be a priority. And sometimes family has to be a priority. I want you to take a moment and think about the most exciting, fantastic moment in your career or your business to this point when you absolutely loved every second of what you were doing and you maybe accomplished something amazing in your business. And think about a moment with your family or a moment in your personal life that was just bliss. Maybe you were on vacation. Maybe you were doing something with your family. Maybe it was a sporting event. It doesn't matter what it was. Maybe you were playing board games in your kitchen, but you were fully present and you were just at a state of bliss and joy with your family. I'm willing to bet that in any of those memories that you recall, it's because in business that moment was because you were highly focused. You achieved something great. You were working on moving forward. Whatever you were working on at the time was a priority. And you achieved it. Or that moment when you were at true joy and bliss with your family or in your personal life was because you were totally focused on them that they came first and they were a priority. And work took a back seat. If you look at work and life at opposite ends of the teeter-totter, sometimes you're going to have the force to push up the work end and work is going to be a priority. And if that happens, life also can't be the priority at the same time. Otherwise your teeter-totter is broken and it doesn't work and it's no fun. That's stress. And then sometimes you're going to push on the life side and work is going to take a little bit of a back seat because that's natural. The issue is the teeter-totter stops being fun when your friend gets on and gets to the bottom and stays there because they think it's funny that you're stuck at the top and you can't get off. Everybody has that friend. Maybe you are that person, right? The only problem where we start having stress in life is when we spend too long at the top or the bottom of the teeter-totter and it's not moving enough. The great thing about riding on a teeter-totter with a friend is it's give and take. One person gets to be at the top and then it's your turn and then it's the other person's turn. When we look at it in terms of work and life, sometimes work is a priority, then family is a priority, then work is a priority, then family is a priority. It's when the teeter-totter is in constant motion that you find the most success in both areas. But what it takes to get there are decisions, plans, and commitments. We go on a lot of vacations. If you are connected with us, my husband or I, on social media you know that we take about eight weeks of vacation a year. So we travel a lot and we do a lot of trips. Last year we did 19 concerts. Including all five of the Grateful Dead shows in the summer and four more at the end of the year. So we do lots of fun things. But at the same time we do an enormous amount of work. It takes decisions. We have to decide that we're going to do fun things but we have to decide when we're going to get the work done. We have to make a plan of how we're going to get the work done so we can have fun. But you also have to plan the fun. So many people don't plan the fun and then the fun never happens and you wonder I didn't go on any vacations this year. But then it's also the commitment to stick to the plan and get it done. So the very first thing is to respect your calendar. My husband's previous job was a fire captain in the fire department before he came toward press. In the fire department he had 18 holidays and vacation days that were available during the year. He could do 18 shifts off. And one day in December, in the first week of December, everybody on his shift went to the same fire station and they took turns based on seniority and you had to pick every single day of your vacation and your holiday on that day for the entire next year. And you don't get to change it. So we went for many years knowing every day that we had for vacation an entire year in advance with no flexibility. At the time that kind of blows. But it was the best thing ever for our family now. My husband quit the fire department to come work full-time in wordpress but we still do the same thing. I have a 36 by 48 wall calendar in my office and every year in December we print one out for the next year and we line out all of the school holidays because we have school we have to deal with. So we line out all of the school holidays first and then we line out all of our family vacations. We know we're gone for a week at Easter. We know we're gonna be gone for a week in June. We know we're probably gonna be gone for a week in July. We line out a week in August. We line out Thanksgiving week. We line out two weeks at Christmas. And we commit to those. They're on the calendar an entire year in advance in Sharpie that does not come off. And we respect the calendar. I get speaking opportunities and I say no because I'm on vacation. Yeah, I could do it live. I could do it via video but I'm on vacation. This is family time, right? So we put it on the calendar and we stick to it. We say no to family things. We say no to events. We don't go to word camps sometimes. We turn down speaking opportunities. We say no to things because that's our family time. That's the time we honor for ourselves. And if we learned, if we don't put it on the calendar, it doesn't happen because then it's too easy to say yes. And then you keep putting off all the fun, right? Because it's not on your calendar. That's why it's giant. That's why it's that big, too. So everybody in the family sees the commitments we're making to fun. So it's having a calendar, putting work and play on your calendar. We have successfully manipulated our Facebook feeds to only show us awesome concerts and fun things that we're interested in. So every time something comes up that we're interested in, Brian will also put it in our Google calendar even if we're not 100% sure we're going because if on a Wednesday we're like, we don't have any plans this weekend and we can look and say these things are going on and then we'll write it on the calendar. Brian will physically go in my office or I will go in my office. Even if it's the next day, we'll write it on there because it's the act of committing to doing it. So make sure that we have the fun. But what enables us to have the fun is strong financial management. These are my kids at the top of Mount Haleakala in Hawaii. We went there for a week for Thanksgiving this year. One of the things that we couldn't do, we couldn't go on a lot of trips not that long ago because there's a thing called the finances and you have to pay your mortgage first. One of the things that we did first is A, pay off all your debt. Get your debt paid down, right? So we live a cash-only lifestyle, so we only pay, we only do buy anything we can do in cash including vacations. But what it comes down to even more is keeping three to six months of all of your business and personal expenses in the bank at all times. So if you lose a client, if something goes wrong, you don't have a lot of stress. You can say, I've got enough money in the bank to carry me till I replace that. Three times in the history of our business we've lost clients that are close to six-figure clients that all of a sudden through no fault of ours, all of it is gone. We worked with a major hospital system that was just under six figures a year and then she moved. She moved, got a new job, somebody else came in. They had a relationship with a different agency. We were out, they were in. Three different times that's happened, but because we keep three to six months of complete operating expenses personally and professionally in the bank, we're able to weather those. The other thing is consistently assessing your expenses. Consistently looking at where am I spending my money, do I need to spend it there? We're spending like $100 a month on cable. We just got rid of it in December and switched to Netflix and Hulu and now we spend like $18. It doesn't sound like a lot. That isn't a huge change, but when you make like ten of those changes, all of a sudden you went from saving $80 a month to saving $500 a month to saving $1,000 a month to saving last year, in the last like 18 months we've trimmed just about $2,000 a month between personal and professional life. How much vacation does that pay for? A lot, right? So it's actively not always looking at making more money, but sometimes looking at doing more with what you have. Making the money you already have work better for you. It's also about always operating below your means personally and professionally. When you always spend less than you have, you always have more room in case other things happen. What also people forget is a lot of fun, a lot of trips, a lot of personal things. It doesn't have to cost a lot. We just spent a week. We did two days in Pinnacles National Park a day in Monterey and we did three days in Big Sur. And we had no internet. I had no internet. Brian's phone connected to Wi-Fi, but not mine. But in that time we're gone for a week. We had amazing family adventures. So much fun. It didn't cost that much because everything we were doing was hiking in national parks and state parks. There are lots of things that you can do to get out from behind your computer, find an outlet to get some exercise and have some fun with your family that doesn't cost a fortune. The other is to get device independent. This is the top of Valley View in Pfeiffer Big Sur State Park. It's like a two-mile uphill and at the very top of this mountain if you look out you can see the ocean and there's an island and it's the Big Sur Light Station. It is the only spot I got to Wi-Fi the entire week. So we spent like 30 minutes at the top of that mountain while I Instagrammed my trip. What was great is the phone ring while we were up there and Brian took client phone calls. Also from the top of that mountain. My kids got to have a nice break before we went back down to the bottom. But being device independent also meant that you're able to work from anywhere. So you're able to go and do fun things but still check your email and get stuff done when you're on the road. So a lot of times we go and we'll get up, we're early people so we'll get up in the morning, we'll get up at 6, we'll work to like 10 or 11 and then we go adventure the whole rest of the day. While we take lots of trips, our clients don't always know we take lots of trips because we're still in contact with them every day. And the reason that that works is because we communicate often and we communicate clearly. And we talk about it in context of business, communicating with your clients. You know, we'll add two weeks before any trip, we'll add it to our email signatures. You know, we're going to be closed, we're not going to be available, we're just, we'll add that in, we'll put it if they're in base camp, we'll add our out-of-office dates to their calendars. You know, we do a lot of prep to let them know that we're going to be gone. Critical, communication is always critical with your clients but what people forget is it's also critical to communicate with your family about what's going on in your business. So one of the things that we do always is this is Thanksgiving 2014. In 2014 we rebranded the entire, our entire company. And I had the logo and the color palette done at the end of September when I spoke at Prestige and somebody said, that's new. When are you going to have a new website? I'm like, bye WordCamp San Francisco. And Brian's texting me, what the hell? Isn't 30 days? So we wrote all new content, designed the whole site, made a portfolio, replaced like 500 blog images. There's an amazing amount of work, like hundreds and hundreds of hours of work in 30 days. And when we started that, we sat the kids down and said, life's going to kind of suck for the next 30 days. Like you're on your own, we're out. We're going to be working from when we get up to when we go to bed. Like we're going to take you to your stuff but you need to like be on it. Get your homework done, get your stuff done. Like you're making your own food. We're not doing play dates, we're doing 30 days. This is our focus. But when those 30 days are over, we're going to Disneyland. It's like the end of the Super Bowl, right? That's what it felt like. That was how much work it was. But that's an extreme scenario. But we keep the kids in the loop about what's going on. We'll often tell them we signed this new project. Oh my gosh. They're paying us all this money. Guess what we're going to do with it? We're going on this trip. Things are going to be really tight. We're going to be working this weekend. We've got this huge deadline. But guess what? After that, we're going to go here and we're going to go hiking. One of the reasons why having a calendar is so great is you know what you need to communicate. You know when you need to communicate with your clients, you know what's coming up. But it's also great that you know what you need to tell your family, what you need to tell your kids and it gives you deadlines. What we do because of that calendar is we work in sprints. I didn't figure it out that I get bored after about six weeks. That six to eight weeks we found is when burnout starts to sit in. Where we start to get that itchy point of I'm tired, I'm exhausted, I'm working really hard, I'm starting to get burnout and I need a break because I'm starting to kind of not like things. That's about how long I can go. And now Brian is the same way. So we found by getting all those things on the calendar when we're starting to get to that point I can turn around and go oh good I have vacation in two weeks or oh good we've got this coming up. I can push it two more weeks. Right? Because for us we work, work, work, work, work we go and we take a break we push and we take a break we come back refreshed and excited we do better work the more vacation we take. When you're burnout and you're tired and you're exhausted you don't do your best work. So we actually produce more work in shorter amounts of time when we take breaks it's true for most people the more time you take to get refreshed and rejuvenated and re-energized about what you do the better work you do and the more productive you are doing it. What Sprintz also does is it gives your clients deadlines they don't need more than likely what you're working on in by done by the week that you're leaving but dang it you leaving means the whole world is coming to an end whatever you ever wanted for you in the entire world needs to be done before you go so if they haven't gotten you content and you're waiting and you're waiting and they haven't gotten their stuff done you tell them that you're going out of town for an entire week and if they don't get it to you it's going to wait till you get back it gets them off the boat every single time every single time so what it has done is created deadlines for our clients as well to move projects along and get them done faster the key is maintaining discipline putting it on your calendar and sticking to it when you're going to be gone don't take that speaking engagement don't cancel your vacation say I was going to go there but a word camp came up take the time for yourself because you'll be happier you'll do better work you'll be more productive and your family will be happier at the same time because everybody's feeling fulfilled so I want to end with you thinking about your life in context of being a teeter totter and to stop trying to stand in the middle and fight and struggle against what's natural just to maintain some kind of balance but instead walk out to the ends and allow yourself to make business a priority sometimes and let your family come second sometimes because it needs to your business needs that and at the same time sometimes let your business be second while your family comes first and just remember not to spend too long at either end because when the teeter totter is constantly moving it's more enjoyable and more fulfilling for everyone this is where you can find me we're going to take a two minute break as we get Jason's