Achieving a work-life balance

Geertjan Wielenga: Is there a danger of taking these problems home with you?

Scott Hanselman: It's a balance. You have to know exactly when to stop. My wife's a nurse and she has to turn her brain off after work. You can't care about everybody or save them all. I would say that I'm pretty good at stopping.

There was a person on my team who was stressed out about stuff and they needed a day to focus on their mental health. They didn't want to take the time off, but I said, "Listen, it's not that big of a deal. The work will still be there on Monday."

My dad used to say, "You're no good to me dead." It's a silly and morbid way to say it, but you need to take a couple of days off. Go to bed. You just have to or you'll go nuts. If I want to go and hang out with my wife, that's okay. I have things I could be doing for work, but I need to not do them at that moment. Remote workers can be paranoid that people are thinking that they don't do anything, so they work extra hard.

Geertjan Wielenga: Do you travel frequently?

Scott Hanselman: Yes, I would say maybe for a week every month. It depends; there are busy times, but I get in and out of a country fast. I'm very aggressive about that. I spend five days away and then come home for dinner on a Friday. I don't spend 10 days going around Europe because I'd rather be at home.

Geertjan Wielenga: What are your tips and tricks for jet lag?

Scott Hanselman: I use melatonin. It works for me. Also, the second I get on an airplane, I switch to local time. That way, I've got time to get acclimated. Most people see a plane as no man's land; they don't know what time it is.

They only start thinking about the time when they land. Get on the plane and spend 11 hours getting ready. It's a psychological trick, but it matters.

Geertjan Wielenga: Let's say that you've traveled to some faraway destination and a technical glitch hits; how do you handle that?

Scott Hanselman: I'm known for not having things go wrong on stage and that comes from a great deal of preparation, as well as knowing what could go wrong. When things do go wrong, assuming it's not my fault, I usually take that opportunity to show the audience how to fix them.

I'm pretty good on stage. You don't usually catch me saying, "Gosh, I don't know what's going on here. I'm just going to give up." That comes from experience. I know what could go wrong. I'm trying to think of the last time something broke and I had no idea why. It's been a long time. I'm not trying to toot my own horn, but if you've run through something many times, you should have already seen it break.

I'm going to go and give a keynote at Microsoft Build in a couple of weeks. We're going to sit down and figure out all the possible things that could go wrong. I want to see things break. It's almost like security risk analysis: "What could go wrong? The network could go down, the disk could go bad, the code could not compile, and so on."

Geertjan Wielenga: How honest are you when you know that there are bugs in the tech that you're talking about in demos? Do you skirt around things? Do you mention them? What's the right approach to that?

Scott Hanselman: If there's a bug bug, you have to be honest. If I'm demoing a beta but I know that a bug has been found and is being worked on, then I can work around the bug. The only "lies" that I've ever told are what I call "sequences have been shortened."

In America, Julia Child was our famous baker. She would make the pie and then she'd put it into the bottom oven. Next, she'd go to the top oven and pull out a cooked pie. I do Julia Child's pie maneuvers occasionally, but that's part of being prepared. That's not a lie and I think the audience knows that.

Geertjan Wielenga: What are you excited about right now in tech?