Work — Live — WOD

Editor’s Note: The picture below, and this article in general, may seem like unusual content to find on the blog of a technical company like Infinity Interactive, but one of our goals here is to give you a full picture of Infinity and our employees, and we think this article by Paul Zolnierczyk, a member of our .NET/Java team, has some important things to say.

Before I joined Infinity Interactive, I worked in typical IT work environments. I can go on about how much better the water cooler talk is over in our ‘#General’ IRC channel but that can be saved for another post. What I’d like to talk about is how working at Infinity Interactive allows me to live my life and truly achieve a healthy work/life balance.

There are only 24 hours in a day and you have to choose wisely how you split that time up to best enjoy your life. Traditionally, IT workers have an 8 hour work day with a half-hour or one hour lunch break somewhere along the way. That alone already accounts for more than a third of your day during your work week. But hold on, you still have to get to work, right? I live in Chicagoland, and at my previous job it took me an hour to commute to work and an hour and half to get back home. And that was best case, assuming there were no accidents or other traffic problems.

So, once you included the commute, I had almost half the hours of my day allocated to work! Where’s the room for my life? I had to sacrifice sleep, the quality of the food I was eating, my interaction with friends and family, and exercise, just to make a living. That’s no way to live your life, but it’s the accepted way of life these days.

Here at Infinity Interactive we don’t believe in that. We have a philosophy where our work day is carved out by the amount of work we have to do and not confined to 9-5. There are days where we will be serving our partners’ needs for 8 hours a day (or more, we don’t mind) and there will be some other days where the work we have only demands a fraction of our time. There might be times where I can do my work in the evening and spend my morning running errands when the roads are less travelled and the stores are empty. As long as we meet our obligations and continue to deliver the exceptional quality the Infinity Interactive brand represents, we are not chained to our desks, watching the clock, counting the minutes until five o’clock.

Since I’ve started working at Infinity, my evenings have become free to do what I want and not what I have to do. I can spend time with family, prepare healthy meals instead of eating fast food and go exercise. No juggling or sacrifices needed.

The most noticeable immediate benefit for me was eliminating my commute. I started putting on those “comfort pounds” soon after my marriage and quickly gained more weight than I was comfortable with. My wife and I decided that we needed to do something before our weight became a serious health concern. We joined a Crossfit “Box” (which is what Crossfitters call a gym) and began to transform our lives with each Workout of the Day, or WOD. Over the course of a year, I’ve dropped forty pounds. This would not be possible if I had to commute to and from work and still make it to one of the evening Crossfit classes. The commute was easily the most draining part of my day.

Because of the philosophy at Infinity Interactive, my wife and I are both reaping the benefits. No longer do we have to split up errands after we get home commuting from work just to catch up for the day, I can take care of most of the chores (although you don’t want me touching laundry), allowing us to live our lives.

Here I am doing Crossfit workout 14.2. The cool thing about using olympic bumper plates: they’re all huge, so it looks like you’re moving a lot of weight even if it’s just two 10lb plates on the bar.

Tags: culture passions