Sheryl Sandberg and Me!
The untimely truth

By Ranjan Yumnam *

At the trendy corporate office of Facebook at the Menlo Park, CA, Sheryl Sandberg, its COO, is a living demi-Goddess, next only to Mark Zuckerberg in the pantheon of geeks' Gods. Last checked, Facebook has at its command a users base of more than one billion, a population larger than that of the continents of Europe and Australia put together.

Ms Sandberg by virtue of being at the helm of Facebook is one of the most powerful women in the tech industry. There is no dispute that her job is a challenging one. She leads an army of bright engineers, marketing professionals, focus groups and creative teams to keep the social media engine running flawlessly, improve users' experience and derive business opportunities for Facebook inc.

Along with her meteoric rise, Facebook has also continued to grow in size, reach and profits. As per the publicly available data, the annual revenue of Facebook in 2012 was $5.08 billion. This is no small change even for a sunrise industry; $ 5.8 billion is nearly 3(three) times the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of a small country like Bhutan.

In terms of financial clout, you could say that she is more powerful than many heads of states.

You would have guessed that managing one of the largest tech companies that oversees a billion denizen, innovating clever revenue stream and fending off threats from new start-ups on daily basis would take a toll on her health and family life. Presumably, she must be working late into midnight and the last person to leave the office building, our guts tell us.

The truth about Ms Sandberg is rather sublime.

Everyday, exactly at five-o-clock in the evening, our Sheryl finishes everything, packs up and leaves office to be with her family and have dinner together. Tick tock. Right on dot. Everyday. Isn't it counterintuitive? While you are busy checking out the profiles of your prospective friends and stalking old flames on FB, she must probably have caught multiple night winks. And it ends well for both Facebook and the nocturnal FB fanatics. Facebook has its eyeballs, and we have our thrills and Sheryl has her peaceful sleep.

Cut to my situation. Here, I am: the lowly second person in the hierarchy of the Government office that I work in. I drag myself to work at around 10 and call it a day, on most days, between 7-8 pm. Unlike Sheryl, I don't command a ridiculously large paycheck. My Department is not a publicly traded corporation; so I don't get stock options that can make me a young millionaire. My Department and sometimes my name are in the news, but mostly for wrong reasons. I don't move around in the town in black limousines flashing red beacon lights and definitely don't live in a palatial house. (Because I don't have a big house I play around with colours to make it somewhat interesting). The office building in which I spend the majority of my waking hours is neither cool; the tired sinews of steel are showing beneath the roof; the corridors are stinking of sewage; the approach road is full of potholes; the staff are bored of routine which I try to enliven with no resounding success so far. In other words, my Department is not cool like Facebook (to be fair, a Government organization is never intended to be cool, but to go cold and somber!)

As you see there is a sea of difference between Sheryl and me. There was never even a case for comparison between the two of us—it is like comparing Las Vegas with Kakhulong. We inhabit two totally different worlds at vastly different planes. It was all the way a phony association of two unlikely places and people!

But behind this cheesy way to start this essay, I was trying to drive home a more profound truth, which is, how we hopelessly mismanage time and confuse being busy with being productive. Being busy isn't a great deal. I can pretend to be busy all day while sitting on a couch dreaming about inventing amazing new products the world has never seen. On such occasion, we need to pinch ourselves and ask: have we accomplished the most important tasks that will have a meaningful impact at the end of the day? Have we created anything new that didn't exist before?

Like Sheryl, can we complete a day's work in time and pursue a life beyond the office with family, friends and people in our inner circle?

The way I look at it, being perennially busy and not being able to reach home in time for the family dinner is a tell-tale sign of how disorganized we are and points at our inability to prioritize our activities. It also raises a red flag that we may have taken on too much beyond what we can chew.

One factor that primes us to disregard work-life balance is the culture we grew up in. Our culture frowns upon those who have enough time at their hands. We even have a name for them—slackers, suningdaba/bi.

Not all people enjoying their leisure and pursuing small joys are jobless, irresponsible and immoral bumpkins. The stigma attached to a person with no engaging task at hand is a vestige from an early age when the only viable way of earning livelihood was to be an agricultural labourer or as a factory worker where time spent at work directly translated into tangible output.

That era is gone. We live in a different age. We are now more or less service providers in a knowledge economy. We don't literally pull levers and operate crowbars. The menial jobs and mechanical activities have been automated through machines and computers. We deal in ideas and abstractions. Our productivity is no longer tied to the amount of time we spend on the job, but rather in the leaps of faith and eureka moments that can occur at our workplace and without, even in our dreams.

Few realize this and when it comes to measuring efficiency at work, our mentality is that of a hunter-gatherer. Time is still the metric to appraise our commitment to work. The smart worker who figured out a way to complete her tasks faster than her colleagues and leaves office early is still considered a pariah at the workplace!

Most people complain that they don't have enough time when the real underlying problem is wastage of too much time on routine tasks that can be delegated to someone else with the same result. The unintended effect of such a mindless use of our time is that consequential matters of great import languish unattended somewhere gathering dust.

The busy people are busy because the busy-business is like a badge of honour. It is a form of neurosis. The utterance of the simple words "I am very busy" is not that simple after all: It is a boast disguised as a complaint (with an implied message: "You know what, I am an important person with great many responsibilities. I have no time for inanities).

God knows, there are so many ways to boost one's ego. To each his own. I am worried about the side effects of the busy trap that afflicts so many people. Foremost concern is the health. Our body and mind needs rest to regain mental sharpness and physical fitness after slogging for a continuous period of time. You lose everything when your health fails. Your work can't save you from the writhing pains of ill health and life's regrets but your family and friends will. When the chips are down and when you are on your own, your bosses won't come rushing to wipe your tears and heal your wounds. They will fade and disappear into the mist of memories and though that haze you will see the comforting and familiar faces of your near and dear ones braving everything to care for you through thick and thin.

Presidents, prime ministers, ministers and our bosses will come and go and they will be forgotten eventually. What will remain with us with are the relationships of blood, sweat and kindred souls—people who are our own and lifelong partners who gave us a wing to soar high from the depths of despair that life sometimes lands us in. I don't want to be that person who will regret not having given much time to those people when I lay in my deathbed.

Talking of president, even Barack Obama, the most powerful and arguably the busiest person on earth, calls it a day at 6 pm and does what Sheryl does. Despite their maddeningly busy schedules of changing the world, they have been able to strike a fine work-life balance. It is beyond comprehension then why you and I, the ordinary mortals, should come home late and eat the cold dinner alone.

In a lighter vein, someone said, "Trouble with the rat race is that even if you still win, you are still a rat." I don't want to be a rat.



(Views expressed are personal and do not represent official position)

Ranjan Yumnam

* Ranjan Yumnam , a frequent contributor to e-pao.net, wrote this article for The Sangai Express. The writer can be contacted at ranjanyumnam(at)gmail(dot)com
This article was posted on December 29, 2013.