Are You on the Right Track?

Imagine the "sorcerer's apprentice" scene in the movie Fantasia, fully remade for modern times. No longer would Mickey Mouse confront those fast-multiplying brooms as they splashed water everywhere. Instead, the onslaught would have a new-economy twist. Torrents of email would come pouring out of a computer. Fresh projects would be announced on ever-tighter deadlines. And all sorts of people -- bosses, customers, and recent hires in search of a mentor -- would march into the picture, each pleading for immediate attention and declaring: "You're the only person we trust to do this right."

Ridiculous? No, reality.

For countless workers and managers at startups or at revitalized older companies, the excitement of rewriting the rules of business -- and the elation of building high-performance organizations in record time -- is accompanied by a dark side. There just aren't enough hours in the day or enough days in the week to get everything done. Important projects pile up at such a rate that they can't all be finished by 6 PM Friday. As such tasks spill further and further into evenings and weekends, something deeply troubling starts to happen. Friendships with people outside work begin to disappear. Cherished side interests -- such as training for a marathon or photographing a favorite beach -- become distant memories. Family rapport suffers. A question looms: If I'm so smart, why am I not enjoying my life more?

A year or two ago, true believers seldom worried openly about such tensions. The payoffs from a little more hard work seemed so immense, and the rewards seemed so close, that it was easy to believe that only the halfhearted or the lazy needed to pause for breath. How times have changed. Suddenly, even well-run Internet companies realize that they can't change the world in a matter of months. They and the people in them must pace themselves for a multiyear struggle to achieve their goals. And the shakeout in the financial markets means that personal sacrifices can't be papered over by the notion that you don't have to worry about how hard you're working now, since you'll be in a position to retire wealthy in three years anyway.

Indeed, at its worst, the new economy's fast track has become nothing more than a road to exhaustion and disappointment -- a journey to nowhere. But the opportunities before us are so great, and our expectations of what we can do from within our companies are so high, that sitting passively on the side of the road is not an option either. That's why a new question faces millions of ambitious people who still want to do great work but who don't want to lose themselves in the process: Am I on the right track?

Listen carefully, and you can hear that question being debated at all levels of your organization, your neighborhood, your family, and your social circle. As people search for answers to that simple six-word question, they must step back and ask a series of other soul-searching questions. What are my priorities? Who are the people that matter most to me, and what should I be doing to strengthen those ties? Do I know how to say no -- and if not, is there a way to learn how? Do I know how to say yes and make it count? Most fundamentally, what am I really trying to accomplish?

It's tempting to argue that there are no winning strategies, only a long line of barely tolerable trade-offs. By that line of thinking, you can check email at 6:30 AM or help make your children's breakfast, but you can't do both. You can rush to the airport for a hastily called client meeting in Chicago or linger over a romantic dinner with your spouse -- but there's no way to be in both places at the same time. And if you want to be part of an exciting new project, say good-bye to weekends that might have been spent backpacking, volunteering, or simply relaxing.

Yet some people are extricating themselves from the worst aspects of the fast track -- to get on the right track. In Los Angeles, an aspiring doctor has carved out blocks of time during more than a decade of medical training so she could become an Olympic athlete as well. In Springdale, Arkansas, one of the Internet's most successful merchants has learned how to prevent overwork from wrecking his family life. And in San Francisco, two high-powered consultants have redefined their jobs so that they can be successful parents too.

It's worth noting that these people are in the middle of their careers and are struggling right now to find answers to the question of how to do great work and still live lives of which they're proud. It's much easier to talk philosophically about balance, trade-offs, and life choices after you've made your millions: "Oh, I gave up so much to get here. If I had it to do over again, I'd spend more time with my kids, my church, and with community groups." Really? Such sentiment is easier to express in retrospect than it is to live in real time.