Becoming Whole Again

The working years

I’ve decided to take a break from corporate life and take some time to reset and become a whole human again. I’m trading in my corporate OKRs for personal OKRs. After more than 20 years of working in technology playing various roles, from writing SQL statements to leading teams with a mission to expand online grocery in Canada, I’ve had the good fortune to work with amazing people and I’m really proud of the work that we’ve done together. We’ve designed and launched industry leading apps, replatformed websites, and introduced new business models to make online grocery even more convenient for customers.

I saw work as a creative outlet, a blank canvas to bring together great people, launch delightful products and just as importantly as a way to give back and contribute to those around me. However, as I was pouring everything into work, I started to lose sight of my own personal goals and some of the most important parts of my life were deprioritized.

Where is the happiness?

I started to question why I felt way happier when I was 21 with no money in my pocket, barely scraping by, not knowing what the future would hold. Now I felt trapped on a treadmill, wanting more and hoping that more money, more status would make me happier but all of this was leaving me feeling empty. After some soul searching, I decided to follow my heart, as a mentor articulated to me – my heart already knows what it wants to do. So it is that I’m following my heart onto a new path.

My new mission over the next couple of weeks, months and years will be to restore and strengthen the key pillars of my life (sleep, family, friends, fitness) and start to introduce new habits and experiments to live a more fulfilling and meaningful life.

Becoming an insomniac

The first and most basic pillar that I was struggling with was sleep – I was turning into an insomniac. Perhaps it was the pursuit of productivity, since the only time I had was early in the day to crank out work before the wall of meetings would take over my calendar. My body would wake itself up early not just during the weekdays, but also on the weekends so that it could get productive. It was hard to relax and unwind, knowing that there was a constant stream of emails and instant messages flying around adding to the list of things to do.

While I was working, I’d be lucky to get even close to 7 hours of sleep. More realistically I was trending in the 5-6 hour range. Getting the recommended 7-8 hours seemed like an impossible dream that I would never achieve. Falling asleep was a challenge and perhaps more frustrating was losing my ability to sleep through the night (there would routinely be a 3am wake up), and if I was able to get back to sleep again I’d get up around 5:30 so that I could relieve my guilt and get to work.

I tried multiple techniques, including mediation, listening to podcasts, reading, playing video games, exercising, and cutting back on caffeine but was met with limited success. The routine that I found worked the best given the circumstances was the following: Get sunlight into the retina right away upon waking up (to reset the circadian clock), exercise, stop caffeine before noon, leave my phone as far away from me as possible and make sure I had fresh bed sheets. I found that this provided the best results, but I still struggled with interrupted sleep and was not able to feel fully recharged.

Ready to become whole

After about 4 weeks into my break from corporate life, my body was finally relaxed enough to fall asleep and stay asleep for 7-8 hours. It must have been the anxiety and stress which I had a tough time managing.

Now that sleep has been restored, I’m looking forward to discovering and documenting new approaches to reinvent ourselves. We’d like to explore questions like: How can you create a life of meaning? What are the best ways to constantly improve your mind and body? How can you create the freedom of time to focus on your loved ones? How can you become whole while putting food on the table?