 Glad to be here. Glad to be at WordCamp Kathmandu yet again after a year. Feels good, feels good. Yeah, so I'll be talking about work life and WordPress for who all that don't know about the term that's been the buzz of the town lately, work life balance. So my topic will revolve around that. So I'm going to talk about work, life and WordPress. So okay, how many of you here know what WordPress is by the raise of hands? Awesome, awesome. And how many of you here know what life is? Whoops. All right, so we'll discuss that then. All right, so we're trying to discuss work life balance. And it's sad that all the hands were raised when we talked about WordPress, but very few when we talked about life. And why is that? Isn't that something of a concern for everyone? Isn't that something that we should be a little more thoughtful about? So let's think about that. Let's talk about that. What is work life balance? Work life balance is when you try and figure out a middle ground between your work and your personal life so that your work doesn't interfere with your personal life, your personal life doesn't interfere with your work. So how do we achieve that? Let's talk about it. Now before I move into something else, I'll be very clear that this is a forever land that we're promised. It's not something that's totally achieved or it's not something that's very easy to achieve. We can try and be there. It's something like a forever land. It's there. Maybe we'll reach it. Maybe we won't, but let's get and let's try and get there. Now I want to start off with a quote from Missal Obama. So she said, we need to do a better job of putting ourselves higher on our own to the list. Now how many of you here by the raise of hands have maintained a to the list in any point of time? Great. And how many of you had your priorities on the to the list that you mentioned? Okay. And how many of you had time for yourself allocated on the to the list? All right. Good. So we have a few numbers, but very few numbers compared to how many of us maintained actually a to the list. So let's try and do that. Let's try and put ourselves a little higher on our own to the list so that we have time for us as well. We put ourselves on the to the list and we work on to ourselves. Now we've been divided into three things tasks, deadlines and family. This is all what our life has been. Right? We've been talking about tasks. We've been talking about deadlines. We've been talking about family. These are the three things that we need to balance. There will always always be tasks. There will always be deadlines, and there will always be family, but we need to prioritize. We need to set ourselves so that it's easier for us to transition from one point to the other. Let's so so that our tasks and deadlines don't mess up with our family time. Our family time doesn't doesn't mess up with our work time. Now our first startup is a company. Since I run a company, I want to start off and put out my points and also want to see that some companies take something from here and start putting it together for themselves as well. As a company, there is more than just expecting work from your team. A happy team is known to deliver better. And this is by far a fact that whenever your team is happy, whatever results that you're seeking is always better than what it would have been if your team isn't as satisfied with your work, with your work culture, with your environment, or the office environment. So yeah, as a company, we need to be doing a lot more to accommodate that. Now we've always talked about the eight hour work day. So the eight hour work day was initiated back in 1867 and was used by Henry Ford in his company for the first time in 1926, which was the first actual implementation of the eight day work, eight hour work day. And then it was added to the US law in 1938. So we've been doing this since 1867 before that we didn't have a rule that a work day had to be of eight hours. Because before that, it was mainly the factories that were employing people and eight hours work day was looked at as something that shouldn't be done. That would decrease the productivity. That is when the law started changing and that is when we started working on the eight hour work day. And while I was at work in Kolkata, I happened to visit a museum there and that is where I found out that even our neighbors in India implemented it in 1942 through B.R.M. Bedkar. So that's when the eight hour work day was implemented in India. However, for us, it came very late. It came after it was added to our labor act. We still had eight hours of work day and six days a week. So it came to us very late. It came, it came to us pretty late in 2048, but still it is time that we start implementing it. We would start taking it seriously because I don't think while this remains the law, not everyone is following it. Now, everyone has been talking about the eight hours, eight hours, but there's an untold 12 by 12. So how many hours in a day? How many hours in a day? 24. So 24 hours, we have eight hours work day, but are we actually working eight hours or are we leaving the untold 12 to 12? So while we talk about eight hours of work per day, almost we agree that our days are split in 12 hours sessions, right? Basically, we're separating 12 hours, segregating 12 hours for our work and 12 hours for ourselves. So and which again comes with its own eight hours of sleep routine. So yeah, how many times are we segregating for ourselves? So yeah, again, like I said, everyone talks about eight hours of work. Everyone talks about we need eight hours of sleep, but nobody talks about the rest eight hours was going to talk to us about the rest of the eight hours. What are we supposed to do on the rest of the eight hours? You're supposed to work eight hours. Fine, we'll work eight hours. You visit a doctor or you visit any same person. They'll say you need eight hours of sleep. Fine, that's all right. But the rest of the eight hours, no one talks about no one tells you what to do on the next eight hours. That's when you think about yourself. That's when you take time for yourself. That's when you take time for your family. That's when you take time for getting things done for yourself. Now how can company help achieve the eight eight eight? Now let's talk about the current scenario. Right now, how many of you maybe how many of you who work here have at one point of time worked on tracked hours? So your hours are being tracked. And how many of you were able to complete the eight hours in eight hours time? How many of you were able to complete the eight hours in nine hours? How many of you were able to complete those eight hours, tracked hours in 10 hours time? Okay. And maybe 11, 12, sometimes? Right. So when you're track time, are you actually working for eight hours? Or are you working for 12 hours? So companies need to think about that. Companies need to think, give it a thought that when you are asking someone to work for you for eight hours, tracked, you're actually asking them to work for 10 to 12 hours. And that's something that companies don't don't seem to agree at the moment. But that's something if you ask your team members, if you ask your staff members, you'd know that eight hours doesn't always mean eight hours, at least for them. So yeah, now we recently had a pandemic. We recently had COVID. So it affected us a lot. But there were a few things that came with it that were positive. Like, besides from COVID positive, we had some other positives. So let's say we started working from home. How many of you had to work from home? Almost everyone had to work from home. Everyone was doing their job well enough, right? So if we see that work from home works for us, why don't we keep implementing it to the next level? Maybe we don't necessarily have to do it throughout. But maybe we could have lesser work hours, we could have a hybrid work culture. So you could come to office, you could work from home, you could work from a cafe, you could work from anywhere else. Until analysts, if they're working, it should be totally fine because if the job is getting done, it doesn't matter where they're working from. And maybe, maybe if hybrid is not your thing, maybe you could do one day a week from, one day a week work from home. That way people would still be giving more time to themselves, to their family, still working on and still have the work going on for themselves. And yeah, let's try and figure out how we can get more work done in lesser time and better work management. Now this might be controversial, but how many of you, so not how many of you, but see as a company, maybe, maybe as a company, if you're hiring 15 people, we could over hire a little. Maybe instead of 15, we could hire 17 people, doesn't add too much to the cost. But what it does is whenever someone has fallen sick or someone needs a leave, they are allowed to have a sick leave, they're allowed to have a leave so that their work can be taken over by someone else. Now let's think about it this way. Okay, let's talk about it this way. How many of you here own a company? Okay, now all the people that raised their hands, I'll take the liberty and I'll assume that all of you work day and night to make the thing work, to make the company work and reach where it is. You didn't have allocated hours for yourselves. You worked extra hours to make your company where it is right now. True? Okay, and along with that, along with you, you also had your team members working extra hours for you? No? No one? Okay, but in general, whenever you're hiring or whenever you have a team, what happens is you have work distribution and whenever you have work distribution, you have team members that are working for you that are working extra hours. Now we have people working during the night, maybe you're asking for work and all those stuffs when they are supposed to be at home. Aren't we supposed to compensate that? When the company is running good, when the company is finally doing better, aren't the team members supposed to have that benefit as well? When we can take the leave when we want, shouldn't they be doing the same thing as well? For example, in my company, some of my teammates are here, probably they'll agree, we have an open leave policy. So whenever you need a leave, you don't ask for a leave, you inform for a leave. So you let us know that you need a leave for something. We don't ask questions, we approve the leave. In fact, we do not approve the leave, the leave is already approved. I hope my teammates can... Yeah, okay. So yeah, that's how we're trying to do it. Not everyone needs to do it, not everyone has to agree to it, but that's something that we try to do so that they feel home, they feel easy to come to us and talk to us about their thing, taking a leave and stuff. So let's try and do that. And for anyone in the team, who are a team member of a particular company, also need to understand that the companies are doing a lot from then for you. So they're trying to have relaxed sessions, they're trying to have lesser words, more maybe extra team members so that your work can be distributed and all those things. So you have to be able to take that stuff as well, use it for your benefit and make sure that you are giving more time for yourselves. You're taking out more time for yourselves because your company is working for you. Now, how many of you have heard of the word brain fog? Okay. So a brain fog is when your brain stops working, right? When your brain actually stops working and doesn't seem to be working the way it should be. I mean, you were smart, but now you can't think of anything. That's when your brain is fogged, FOG. Okay. And then what it needs is brain fog. You need to hug it out. You need to hug out and relax your brain a little bit. Now, okay, again, I'll keep giving you exercise of raising hands. So how many of you were stuck on a particular problem that you solved when you were in your toilet? Wow. And how many of you were able to solve your problems when you were actually sleeping? So your brain works better in your toilet or in your bed, right? Wrong. It doesn't. I'm sorry to break it to you, but you're not super intelligent in your toilet. You're the same person. You're equally smart in your toilet as you are right now. It's just that your brain is fogged. Now, how do you do that? Now, whenever you're taking that blue break or when you're sleeping, what you're doing is you're taking your mind off of that particular problem, right? You're not thinking about that problem because you've stressed so much about that problem you weren't able to solve. What you did was you relaxed a little bit. You went to the toilet, took a break, or maybe you were smoking and you solved the problem. So you took a break. Maybe you solved it while you're sleeping. So you basically took a break. You took a break from the problem. When you let the problem be, then the solution came to you. So I'm sorry you're not smarter in your toilet, but yeah, it's the same thing. Kind of give it a chill time and you'll probably be able to solve that. So let's focus on that. Let's focus on giving more time to ourselves and sorry for the bad news. But yeah, again, take vacations. Take leaves. Make sure that you are giving your mind a little more time. You're giving yourself a lot more time than you are supposed to, that you're giving right now. Again, vacations aren't only for the rich. Now, when I say that I had to put that icon over there, sorry for the low quality, but I had to put an icon over there. Whenever I say, oh, whenever you hear the word vacation, what do you imagine? You either imagine beaches, right? Or you imagine mountains. Does it always have to be beaches? Does it always have to be the sun and the umbrella and whatever that is called? Doesn't have to be, right? Vacations can be anywhere. You can go to Thailand for a vacation. You don't have enough money. You can go, sorry, yeah, you don't have enough money. You could go to Pokhara for vacation. You don't have enough money. You could go to Nagarkot for a vacation. You don't have enough money. You could go for a picnic, right? The vacation is not only for the rich and it's not always supposed to be sun and beach and umbrellas and those stuffs. It can be anywhere. If you can, please go. If you cannot, a picnic is a vacation too. Take a leave, give your brain a little bit of a break. See that you have more time for yourself and then you're not always stressing on work because like I said, if you keep stressing on your work, you won't get the job done. Take a break and you'll definitely be there because your brain had the time to chill and relax. And yeah, that's about it. My name is Utsav Singh Rathore. I run a company called CodePixels Media. You can find me on Twitter or X. It is right now at Rathore and Instagram at Utsav Yassar. And yeah, anything, any questions that you may have, please put it through. Thank you, everyone.