In every AIESEC International Congress 2009 meeting, we have this part of it called “social life updates”.

It is because that everyone is coming together to work on this congress for the first time. We don’t really know each of our background much and this part of the meeting is for us to get to know each other better. Sort of life, instead of me asking “What have you been doing?” to each and everyone all over again we know the answer already.

Just yesterday, I’ve attended a talk by Dato’ Idris Jala, the MD/CEO of Malaysia Airlines. One of the questions asked during the Q&A session was about balancing work and personal life. He said that those who said that they have no time for social life or what not are bullshitters.

I agree. I mean, the definition of social life is very broad. It is up to an individual to decide what it is their “social life” is. If they feel that not going out for yum cha for a very long time means no life, so be it.

Then, I look at myself and I began to think. Work has been really catching up on me. I’ve made a realignment to focus on the more important things in life to me. Not to say that I’m neglecting what I’ve been enjoying for the past few months, but priorities was needed to be set.

To me, my social life has been a mixture of online and offline approach. I either chat up with friends online or catch up offline when we meet up or over the phone. I have pretty much cut my online time a lot since 1 week ago as I know I have this bad habit of not getting work done when I’m online reading blogs and chatting and what not. Yes, it doesn’t consume much of my time, but still discipline needs to take place.

But then again, one tool that I find it useful is emails. It is the best way to get message across and sometimes, I do admit that it takes me a long time to reply emails. I do read them, but replying takes time until a time when I track back my emails and find myself saying “Oh, ! Haven’t reply you“. Hehe. Such bad habit. I know.

So which left to the options of catching up with friends out of the online medium over food or over the weekend outing and the phone call option.

This is another tough call as I don’t find myself getting home early and that pretty much kills my time to meet up with friends. Then also, I’m kinda like the champion of last minute plans. Not many can accommodate that last minute thingy. Haha. I tried to, you know, throw everything down and do some dinner meet up and then continue back to my work. It is not working well recently because after dinner, I want to sleep. -_- Susahlah ini macam. But if I am very free, usually in the middle of the month, all out lah.

Family also comes first and most of the time when I’m in Klang with my family, I don’t really go out. Understand lah this part, but then when friends know I’m in Klang, they will say I don’t find them. How now? Hahaha. But then hor, I do go out and join yum cha session when they call. That is “when they call”.

Then the final option is to socialize over the phone which I bet most of you do. I do that too and very often I must say. I don’t meet most people every time and calling them to catch up is the next best thing to do. Don’t you agree? Talking time usually starts very late at night when I am settled down and nothing else to worry so not to interrupt the catching up session.

Being late at night past 10PM, there are only a handful of them who will pick up the calls. Heck, they might not be free at all to talk to you or rather don’t want to talk to you (sad case right? Haha) . I’ve got this comment once when I called my friend like 11PM in the night. “Hello, I need to sleep you know! Not like you!” but we went on and chatted for some time. Hence, the SMS option that comes handy and I think it is karma for this SMS bit. I seldom reply SMS on time either. Imagine one SMS I received 2 days ago about some request, I left it there in my inbox and then replied only yesterday night when I sat down to clear my inbox. How pathetic right?

I think my social life is like so the complicated. It is like a relationship that has no direction. Quite the sad right? But no lor, I feel that my social life is good already lah comparing to previous as I find now, the social life is more of a quality towards what I want to achieve. Back then, it is all party, party and endless party. But now it is meeting, networking, catching up with long lost friends, events and so forth.

This whole work and social life balancing thingy needs time to fine tune lah.

A step which I’ve been taking is to start sports lah. Which was a random decision to text Rue last week. “I’m looking for a Tennis court. We should start it all over again“. He replied “Set!“. I personally think, over games like this it’s a good time to catch up too.

I’ve not found a Tennis court to rent, yet. Haha… I shall stop procrastinating and go and rent a court by next week!!! There! I’ve set myself a dateline. I shall make it happen!