Qualtrics CEO Ryan Smith uses this simple work-life balance trick

Qualtrics
CEO Ryan Smith at TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2015.
Steve Jennings/Getty Images for
TechCrunch

When a company
offered to buy Ryan Smith’s startup Qualtrics for more than $500
million, he asked his wife to take a drive.

The deal, and the amount of money it would net his family, was a
lot to process. But after
just 30 minutes of driving south, the couple decided to turn it
down.

They felt earning so much money
at once could negatively impact the way they were raising their
children. 
And
although Smith had been running his business for nearly a decade,
he had gotten good at balancing both work and his personal life,
so being an entrepreneur wasn’t a major strain on his
family.

Together, the Smiths decided to
keep Ryan’s 800-person survey company private — at least until
now, as SAP
announced it was buying Qualtrics in an all-cash deal for $8
billion, just days before the company was set to IPO.

It wasn’t always easy for Smith
to feel successful at both home and work. He, like many
executives, uses a CEO coach to help him keep things balanced. He
likens work-life balance to a plane that can easily go lopsided
and constantly needs to be stabilized. One wing represents his
family’s needs, the other the needs of his work. When he’s on a
business trip, for example, one side of the plane tilts down.
When he returns to his family and clears out the weekend for his
children, it’s tilted back up.

Smith’s CEO coach taught him a
way to plan for success that can be implemented every week. He
described it to a group of fellow CEOs at a conference in Ireland
in 2014. 

The coach asked him which jobs
he was responsible for. Smith replied that he was:

1. A husband
2. A father
3. A son
4. A CEO
5. A boss
6. A sibling
7. A grandson
8. A friend

The CEO coach then asked him
what he could do for each job that week to make him feel
successful. He noted that if he took his wife on a
date and bought her a surprise bouquet of flowers, that might
make him feel like a good husband. And if he taught his daughter
to ride a bike, he would feel like a better dad.

Ryan Smith describes
work-life balance as a plane that constantly needs to be
stabilized.

Flickr/Daniel
Gies

He also found that he could combine tasks on his list to achieve
everything quickly. If he was really productive, every task
written on Sunday could be accomplished by Tuesday.

For example, if he took his daughter to his parent’s house and
taught her to ride a bike in their cul-de-sac, he could be both a
good father and son. 

So Smith’s weekly job list
began to look something like this:

1. A husband – Take wife to
   dinner and buy her flowers
2. A father – Teach daughter to
   ride a bike
3. A son – Visit parents.
   Combine tasks 2 & 3.

Smith learned that people
often plan for one phase of life (“I’m going to sell my company
by the time I turn 30.”) But they either don’t know which steps
to take to achieve that goal, or they don’t plan what to do after
the goal has been achieved.

His CEO coach’s plan breaks
daunting life goals into weekly tasks, so people don’t wake up
one day and realized they’ve let major priorities slip.

Shortly after Smith explained
this success tactic on Friday evening, he left the conference.
Others stayed out late and partied at a local pub, but Smith
drove 3 hours to Dublin and booked an early flight home to Utah.
That way, when his children woke up on Sunday morning, they’d be
able to spend all day with their father.