For most of my poker career, I preached work-life balance—the need to focus energy on life outside of the game.

Poker was unique, I thought, in the way that it can lead to losing for extended periods of time. And, if poker makes up most of your life, and it’s going badly, it can feel like everything is.

As I’ve expanded professionally, going from playing poker to running businesses, coaching, and creating content, I’ve realized that poker isn’t all that unique in this way.

If your work is all-consuming, whatever it is, you run the risk of “losing” for a while, and feeling like your whole life is in a slump.

Losing as a business owner doesn’t look all that dissimilar from losing at poker. Losing as an employee is a bit different, but can be every bit as defeating.

So, am I saying that everyone needs work-life balance?

No, actually. I now think perhaps nobody does.

Let’s get into it.

The Imbalancing Act

Balance is arbitrary. It implies giving an equal amount of attention to various aspects of your life (so that they balance out).

Even if we don’t take it that literally, it also implies that there is an ideal balance out there – the right number of hours to dedicate to work, your health, your family, your friends, and whatever other areas you want to include in this category list.

And that would imply that this perfect balance is constant, not something that should change given your circumstances.

Now, am I reading too much into the implications of the word “balance?”

Maybe. But words are important!

Shifts in the Weather

We all go through different seasons in our lives. And much like the changing weather, these seasons call for adjustments in our routines, priorities, and how we equip ourselves.

The right “balance” for a 21-year-old, up-and-coming poker pro is different from the right balance for a 45-year-old accountant with a wife and three kids. The right “balance” can be different from one year to the next, or even one month to the next, based on what you want to take on and what your life and career are demanding of you.

It’s okay to be in a season of long work hours and little time for friends if you determine that to be the best path for you right now. It’s okay to be in a season of less work and more focus on family, even at times when work is extra demanding.

I took over a month off of work during the most hectic work period in my life because my son was born. I planned for it ahead of time, working overtime to ensure things would go more smoothly while I was gone, and I detached and focused on my family, putting work mostly out of my mind, when I decided that was what I wanted to dedicate my time to.

I wasn’t remotely balanced during either of these periods.

So, should we just do whatever we feel like we need to do?

Not so fast.

How Are You Deciding?

Is poker getting stressful and you just want to battle your way out of this downswing, studying extra hours until you can get things back together?

Are you taking it day by day, playing extra long sessions when you feel like it, canceling plans with friends and family because the games tonight are good, again and again?

Or have you evaluated your goals and opportunities and carefully decided that the next three months are a time for focus? Or, when specific games arise, you drop your plans for them; otherwise, you’re off work at 9pm to be with your family?

There’s a difference between:

Flying by the seat of your pants, taking it one day at a time, only to wake up 3 years later, realizing you’ve neglected your health and relationships, and
Making a conscious decision and a plan to take these steps for now to achieve a specific goal.

Note: This can work the other way too – spending all your time and energy on a new relationship or hobby without making a plan to do so, only to wake up years later, having fallen behind in the game and missing several big opportunities.

The difference, which should be clear by now, is intentionality.

If we’re being intentional about our schedule, our energy, and our focus, it’s okay that things might not look particularly balanced.

But, that doesn’t mean we should forget about the other areas of our lives. In fact, I believe we should involve them heavily in the process. Not striving for perfect balance, but rather for something else.

Harmony

A few years ago, I was introduced to the phrase work-life harmony.

As soon as I heard it, I knew I liked it better than the work-life balance I had sought for so long.

As the term implies, work-life harmony means that the different areas of your life work well with each other. You may focus much more on specific areas at certain times, but you do so in an intentional way that aligns with your values and allows you to still tend to the deprioritized areas.

It involves sustainability – creating routines, habits, and systems that prevent burnout and support long-term wellbeing.

For example, it’s one thing to spend a lot of time working and less time on your health. But if you neglect your diet, fitness, and sleep entirely, that’s going to lead to much worse quality work (in addition to wrecking your body).

So perhaps this season, you drop cooking and you find a healthy meal-prep service that doesn’t taste quite as good to reheat in the short breaks you allow yourself. Maybe instead of working out 5 times a week for an hour, it’s 4 times a week for 20 minutes.

Maybe instead of seeing friends twice a week, it’s once every two weeks.

It’s more work and less attention elsewhere, but it’s intentional and sustainable. It’s by design.

Relationships

I’ve had seasons of extremely heavy workloads, both before and after becoming a family man. And I have done it wrong many times.

Of the poker players I work with, one of the most common struggles as it relates to reaching their goals is scheduling and family. I’ve seen many players who followed the same path as I did – starting a poker career as a single guy with no responsibilities, taking on more responsibilities and relationships, and not being able to push as hard or obsess as much as we used to.

Sometimes it comes from a place of personal boundaries: “I’m not willing to give up taking my kids to school in the morning. I don’t want to miss dinner with the family or to work weekends.”

Other times, it comes from external pressure: “My partner complains that I’m working too much, not helping enough, and not giving them enough attention.”

In both cases, it’s a tough obstacle to overcome. How do we find harmony between these areas of our lives? How do we tend to all of the things we care about as much as we would like to when we only have so many hours in the day?

I don’t have the secret hack, but I do have some thoughts, based on what I’ve learned from my own experience and from others.

1) Quality over Quantity

Not all hours are created equal.

The eighth hour of your poker session is not going to be as focused as your first. Your fourth hour of study isn’t going to be as impactful as your second.

Perhaps more importantly, split focus is a great way to damage all of the hours you have in your day.

Optimizing your schedule to get the most out of the hours you have, in all areas of your life, is a way to find time where there isn’t any. A quality hour is worth three low-quality hours in most cases.

Would your family rather have 6 hours of your time while you’re studying poker on your phone and responding to emails, or 3 hours during which you're fully present, happy, and energized?

2) Energy

Bringing energy to each thing you do is a superpower. And it’s not an easy thing to do.

I’ll speak from my own experience. If I work a 10-hour day, hopping from call to call and task to task with no real breaks, other than quick bathroom trips or scarfing down a protein bar, and then leave my office to join my family when the agreed-upon work time is over…

They aren’t getting the best version of me. I collapse onto the couch. My son wants to play with me, and I try to talk him into watching TV. There’s a chore to do, and I sit there and let my wife do it.

My energy is gone. Not only my physical energy, which is drained, but my emotional energy. I’m not even excited to be there. Even if you take away my phone and other distractions, forcing me to be present, the real me – the best me – still isn’t there.

Now, if instead, I start my day with a solid morning routine, get in a great workout, and take breaks every couple of hours to stretch or walk or rest… at the end of my work day, I’m showing up in a way I can be proud of.

“Yeah, let’s go play outside!”

“No, honey, I got it. You relax – you’ve had a long day.”

And what did I sacrifice?

Probably two out of those 10 working hours. But here’s the secret…

I did more in those energized 8 hours of work than I’d have done in 12 low-energy hours.

I’m showing up more fully in meetings, creating more things (like this newsletter, for example) per hour, or playing poker with more focus and presence.

So I did more work, showed up better for my family, and got physically healthier (rather than the opposite). And if I took one of those two hours away from my family time instead of my work time, it still would’ve been a win-win-win.

Managing your energy is the key to so much of succeeding at whatever it is you want to do.

Energy and Tasks

It’s not only about breaks, diet, and exercise. It’s also about what you work on and what people you engage with. What are the tasks that drain your energy? What are the things that give you energy?

If someone bugs me to [redacted so nobody can take it personally], and I don’t want to but feel like I have to, that’s a recipe for draining my energy.

If I hop on a small group call with my team or BTG members and have a free-flowing and meaningful conversation, I leave that call with more energy than I entered it with.

Recognizing which parts of your day give you energy and drain your energy is incredibly valuable. Sometimes you can delegate or automate certain energy drains. Sometimes you can remove them entirely, even if it means sacrificing some EV in the short term. It’s likely you’ll recoup that EV and then some elsewhere.

Your Own Expectations

I want to be clear that I never want to talk someone out of what’s most important to them. I’m not trying to change anyone’s priorities.

Instead, I want to encourage you to keep an open mind – to remove rigidity and truly question things.

Is it true that you’re a bad father if you miss two family dinners a week?

Is that true no matter what you and your family get in return for that?

What if it gave you more time with your family overall?

I’m not telling you to skip dinner with your family. I’m telling you to ask yourself if it’s true that given all of your and your family’s goals, it’s exactly where you, and they, want you to be at that time. That it’s better than the alternatives.

Several years ago, my wife asked me if I could stop working seven days a week (I told you I made some mistakes!). She wanted a weekend with me, starting with one day a week and eventually moving to two.

But a year ago or so, I realized that:

We almost never had time together alone since becoming parents, and
My early morning hours are my most impactful work hours

So I proposed a switch: instead of five full days per week, what if I worked 4 full days and two half days? I’d even drop a couple of total hours.

This way, we get some time together alone while our son is in school, and I get roughly the same amount of work done in less time. It’s been a great win-win for us!

Spending 11 hours with them instead of 15 hours on Saturdays doesn’t take away from our feeling like a family.

But having 6 hours with my wife on a weekday instead of 0 hours has made a meaningful difference for us.

And my work hasn’t suffered.

If I had a story in my head that "good dads and husbands don't work on weekends" (which I obviously didn’t, given where I started from!), I’d have been closed off to this solution.

Their Expectations

A more common challenge I’ve seen people face is feeling like they could use more work time to achieve their goals, but fearing (or knowing) it would disappoint their partner – that it might get them in trouble.

For this, I see two clear potential solutions.

The first is what I did with my wife, as mentioned earlier: I proposed a trade, so to speak.

“If I get this, it would allow me to do this. Would that work better for you too?”

It helps if you have a reason for it, and it helps even more if it involves your family. My reason, "I really want to spend more time together as a couple," is a good example of a meaningful reason.

But even if your reason is that the timing simply works better for you – as long as they like what they get in the trade, it can still work well!

The second solution is a bigger undertaking, but it’s the most impactful one. It’s something I recommend everyone do. It starts with getting very clear on your own goals and vision for your future.

Next, you ask your partner about their goals and vision for their future, and for your future together. You compare notes, and you come away with a shared vision and set of goals for your family.

In a good relationship, you’ll care about their goals, and they’ll care about yours – sometimes because they align well with each other, and sometimes simply because the person you love wants it to happen.

With your partner enrolled in your shared vision, they become a true teammate.

If we take a step back and think about running a business, one of the keys to team motivation is that your team members can see how their individual work contributes to the success of the business. There’s a big difference between “do this data entry” and “please fill in this information. We’ll use it to reach out to potential partners more efficiently. If it works as planned, we should grow our revenue by 15% this year. I’ll keep you posted on how it goes!”

Similarly, there’s a big difference between, “I need to work two more hours. You take Timmy to practice,” and your partner helping you find more hours in your week so you and the family can move into your dream home by 2026.

They can go from feeling like you’re shirking responsibility and they have to pick up the slack to feeling like they are actively contributing to, and are a key part of, your shared vision – which they are! They just didn’t see as direct a connection before.

Get to Harmonizing

I hope a section or two in here spoke to you and your situation and that you found it helpful.

If you’ve been reading my newsletter for a while, you might have noticed a dropoff in frequency. In essence, I’ve been applying a concept from this post: Energy.

I started off with a love for writing and a bunch of ideas that had been brewing in my head for a while.

After many months, the great ideas to write about stopped coming every week. So I “had to” make something up to write about and force myself to do it.

Part of this is that my schedule got extremely busy starting around July of this year, when I set out to launch my big coaching program, BTG, and it only got busier as we geared up to launch BetRivers Poker in Pennsylvania.

My task list and “want-to-do” list have been endless, and the weekly obligation to write led to stress and uninspired writing.

So, I’ve been trying to write only when an idea strikes and I’m excited to share it.

I expect that I’ll start getting some more of my time back as there are fewer and fewer one-time business setup type tasks and decisions, but I don’t know exactly what the frequency will look like over the next year.

What I can promise is that I’ll do my best to make the content valuable when I share something!

Thanks for your patience, and thanks for being here with me.

Why I No Longer Aim for Work-Life Balance