Work Life Balance & Bad Management

I just read Scott Berkun’s essay on How To Survive A Bad Manager. Scott’s stuff is always a good read, particularly for office drones like me. Some of the situations he writes about make you sit up and say, “Hey, that’s me!”

Anyway, toward the end of the article, Scott suggests trading off the frustrations of bad management against the benefits of better work-life balance:

Meaningfulness pop quiz: Is what you are doing today going to mean anything to anyone, yourself included, in a month? a year? 5 years? 20?

Now, if you’ve read this blog before, you’ll know my thoughts on work/life balance. Can you think of things you obsessed about in work five years ago? Were they worth it? What else could you have been doing?