On this fine Saturday, my third post in our new series The Support Outsider, a unique look into VMware from the point of view of an outsider (that’s me), Intern Moses Masih.

Maintaining a healthy work-life balance is crucial to enjoy work. This week I am going to discuss a challenge I faced in the first few weeks of the job, work-life balance.

A week or two into the internship I completed basic training and started helping out on small jobs. Soon enough I was given my own work tasks and deadlines too. I was excited to finally contribute to the team so I started putting in some extra time and effort to be more productive. While initially it felt rewarding to work at a high level soon I realised that all I thought of most of the time was work related. My work didn’t stop when I left the office, I was bringing it home with me. I didn’t think this to be a bad thing at the start but pretty soon I started feeling that my work life was over powering my personal life.

I started feeling like my activities at home, away from the job, had shrunk to eating, sleeping and getting ready for work the next day. Though I knew that I spent a lot more time at home than I did at work, my mind was convinced that the majority of my day was spent working. This was rather annoying as I couldn’t share this with my team, I felt like I was the only one who had ever faced this problem. I started looking out for solutions.

One evening I saw the main character in a TV show facing the same problem as me and he took a deep breath and time began slowing down. I tried that the next day and while that approach didn’t necessarily work for me I did understand the point they were trying to get across. I stopped rushing into my work tasks and thought about and allocated the time I would spend on them before I started any work on them. This led me to making a rough timetable of the tasks and time to be spent on each task on a daily basis.

I can share this challenge now, after I have developed somewhat of a work-life balance, but while looking up the subject online I found a lot of good help. So if you are going through the same, my advice would be to develop a healthy work-life balance that suits your job. I enjoy both my work and personal life more now, though taking a deep breath when you feel stressed doesn’t slow down time it still helps.

Be sure to come back next week to check on my adventures as I go exploring this new world of virtualization.