Why I stopped trying to balance work and life
For years, I treated “work-life ballance” like a system to optimize. I used to believe that if I just planned better, woke up earlier, or multitasked harder, surely I could keep both sides level.
But when our second child Mino was born in September 2025, that illusion shattered. There’s no such thing called work-life balance. At certain stage of life, as a good product manager, you have to tip the scale to whatever is more important.
The breaking point
Those first few weeks were total chaos. Every morning started at 5:30 AM. Mino would scream for milk, waking up Mira (our toddler) who’d cry in sympathy because her baby brother had disrupted her sleep. By 8AM, when the chaos finally settled, I was already exhausted and that’s when my workday began.
I used to be the PM who never missed a meeting. But now morning calls with my US teamates became impossible. Evenings were not any easier. Bedtime was another domino effect of tears. I simply couldn’t attend evening Zoom calls anymore.
That was the moment I realized: family comes first, and I have to work around that - not against it. I found myself declining more meetings, picking only the most important ones, especially those with customers.
I wrote crisp updates and specs with the help of AI, so I could handle more asynchronously. But beneath the structure, I felt waves of overwhelm and exhaustion - not from work itself but from the guilt of constantly feeling behind in both worlds.
The guilt of trying to do it all
Mira, my daughter often barged into my home office mid-call. “Daddy, come play with me”, she’d say and I had to tell her “daddy is working, go play elsewhere”. Those moments gave me tremendous guilt. My wife shouldered most of the childcare so I could focus. She’s a champ. But I often felt I was taking advantage of her strength.
If Mira someday asks me, “why do you work so much?”, I’d tell her I’m trying to give her the best life I can. But if I’m honest, part of it is ego. I want to prove to myself that I’m capable. That I can climb the ladder, not just for money but for meaning.
That’s the tricky part about ambition: it’s both fuel and fire.
Work is infinite - and that’s the problem
The hardest part of my job is the late-night calls. Most of my customers are in a different timezone, and “be obsessed” is one of our company’s core values. For years, I equated obsession with sacrifice. I thought burnout was a virtue - proof that I cared.
It took me a long time to realize that’s not true. Work isn’t a finite stream you can finish and then rest. It’s infinite. There’s always another message, another doc, another fire. If you don’t learn to stop, it won’t stop for you.
I used to motivate with guilt and fear as if taking a break meant I didn’t care enough. But guilt and fear are not sustainable. I’ve learned to pause before I break. To pace myself for the marathon instead of sprinting until I collapse.
Still, there are moments I feel like a fraud, telling my team to protect their weekends while I secretly logging on during mine. I’m working on that. Old habits die hard.
The mindset shift
The real change happened during my parental leave, when I stumbled upon a book called Replacing Guilt by Nate Soares. It helped me realize that for most of my career, I’d been driven by fear - fear of missing out, fear of being irrelevant, fear of not being good enough.
But the truth is, I’m not as important as I thought. The company is full of brilliant people. They can figure it out without me. That realization wasn’t deflating - it was freeing.
Now instead of obsessing over balance, I focus on leverage. I use AI to handle the mundane - writing specs, summarizing meetings, drafting emails, building clickable prototypes so that I can spend more time where humans make the biggest difference: talking to customers, making tough trade-offs, and thinking deeply.
No police agency wants to give product feedback to a chatbot. That’s still our uniquely human edge.
Redefining “enough”
I still consider myself a hard worker. But I’ve learned I don’t have to sprint forever. My new definition of “enough” is simple: if I can get into “the flow”, deliver meaningful work with high quality, and still have the energy to play and laugh my kiddos at night, that’s enough.
I don’t need to grind until midnight or chase marginal gains that no one will notice. I don’t need to prove my self-worth through exhaustion.
Some weeks, I’ll sprint hard. Other weeks, I’ll slow down, zoom out and let things breathe. Work-life balance isn’t the goal anymore. Alignment is.
Am I spending my time on what matters most? Am I proud of my tradeoffs? Am I giving my best self to both my work and my family, not all the time but enough of the time?
That’s what real balance looks like to me now. Not a perfect 50-50 split, but a fluid ever-shifting rhythm, messy, human, and sustainable.
Closing thoughts
If you’re trying to “balance” work and life and feel like you’re drowning, maybe the problem is not your schedule. Maybe it’s the myth that balance means equal.
It doesn’t. It means enough.
And sometimes, enough looks like logging off before 5PM to comfort a crying toddler, and realizing that actually you chose right.