‘Work-life balance’ is a term that’s thrown around a lot these days. We all want ‘more of it'; everyone is giving advice about how to get ‘it’, and companies claim they’re doing something about ‘it’… But what is work-life balance, and can you ever actually achieve it?
When we talk about work-life balance it’s never about adding more work into the mix, but always about adding more life. It’s about making sure that you have time to go to the gym after work, have dinner with your family, play golf with your buddies on Sundays, or for women in particular, it’s about balancing childcare with career advancement. Companies have started investing in ‘corporate athlete’ programmes, coaching employees on eating well and exercising and implementing more flexible working arrangements that allow working from home, give men an extra week of paternity leave, and allow you to take unpaid sabbaticals.
But as Nigel Marsh said in a Ted Talk titled ‘How to make work-life balance work‘ (– well worth a watch! Spot on, and very funny), “being a fit 10-hour-a- day office rat isn’t more balanced, it’s more fit”. Corporate programmes will never address the fundamental issue, that is, the work itself. As Seth Godin has often been quoted as saying, “Instead of wondering when your next vacation is, maybe you should set up a life you don’t need to escape from.”
Work-life balance is also often defined as something you attain over time: slave away now so that you’ll have the financial freedom to take an early retirement later. It’s the classic model of working 80-hour weeks in the city before moving out to the suburbs and starting a family, or “escaping to the country” to enjoy your pension. A well-publicised example of this is Google CFO Patrick Pichette’s resignation memo in which he explains how he had agreed with his wife up Mt. Kilimanjaro to retire from his job to travel the world with his wife. He writes, “In the end, life is wonderful, but nonetheless a series of trade offs, especially between business/professional endeavours and family/community.” But is this really the way it has to be? Postponing your life until the time you can retire, until you’ve earned ‘x’ amount of money, to last you ‘x’ amount of time, is a very risky strategy – and an unbalanced one at that.
At the opposite end of the spectrum, we have Tim Ferriss advocating the four- hour work week: setting up a business that is so completely automated that you can remove yourself from the business and become a world champion of Argentine tango. This ‘unconventional’ approach is being embraced by more and more people and you can find countless posts online with such appealing titles as ‘5 Reasons You Should Quit Your Job to Travel Now’, ‘This is How I Get Paid to Travel the World’, ‘6 Steps to Create a Profitable Business Online and a Lifestyle of Freedom and Adventure’…
Even if this does work and may very well be appealing to a lot of people – I’m not convinced that this is the answer to work-life balance, either. While I’m all for travelling, I also enjoy the challenge of real work projects, getting to know new colleagues, working on something meaningful and seeing the results. I want to enjoy my work as much as I also want to challenge myself and learn new things in my personal life.
So perhaps more than balance I’m looking for a ‘blend’ of work and life. Technology, of course, has made this increasingly possible. Blurring the boundaries between work and life is presumed bad if it means taking your work home from the office to slog away in the evenings, on weekends, and on your holidays, never turning off your phone, and never being in the present moment with your family – more than anything that kind of blurring can lead to burnout. However, if blurring the boundaries means enjoying your work as one of the many challenges in your life then I believe this blurring is no bad thing. In fact, an anthropologist definition of happiness is ‘when you can make as little distinction as possible between your work and your play’.
The desire for integration between work and life seems to be a trait of the infamous Millennial Generation: we are blurring the boundaries between personal passions and professional work, between friends and colleagues, and are put off by environments where such formal barriers exist. We want autonomy, flexibility and integration between work and life. We want to strive for a better working world; more than ever, we want to do meaningful work.
I actually don’t think it’s constructive to think in black-and-white terms at all: work versus life, hard work versus fun and fulfilment. The entire concept of work-life balance is an artificial construct, a false dichotomy. Work is not separate to life but an inherent part of it, whether we mean the standard white-collar definition of ‘9-to-5’ in the office or a more modern idea of remote working and virtual offices. If you hate those hours that you’re spending working – whether it’s four hours or forty or more – then no amount of ‘life’ after work is going to make up for that.
For for me, it’s not so much a question of balance between work and life as an overall sense of balance across the different aspects of life to keep myself challenged and fulfilled; earning enough money, spending time alone and with friends and family, eating well and staying fit, learning new skills and having new experiences, and taking time off to relax.
The first step towards achieving this kind of balance is to define what is important for you; that is, your own definition of what you need to balance in order to feel fulfilment in your life. One approach to defining what matters to you is Steven Covey’s concept of five “Big Rocks”, the most important and meaningful priorities in your life ahead of all the other little tasks and distractions. Arianna Huffington identifies four pillars required in order to Thrive: wellbeing, wonder, wisdom and giving. In another great book The Power of Full Engagement, on managing energy, not time, Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz talk about a balance between four energies: physical, emotional, mental and spiritual. Whether you think in terms of rocks or pillars or energies, or something completely different, it’s important that you review your priorities regularly. ‘Balance’ is inherently an ongoing activity, not just a one-off: you need to continue to experiment with a little more of this, a little less of that…
Ultimately it’s a choice of how you want to live your life.
I’m reminded of one of my favourite quotes from Viktor Frankl, who survived the Nazi concentration camps and found that our deepest desire is to find a meaning to our lives:
“Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather he must recognize that it is he who is asked.”
If you don’t answer that question, if you don’t make these choices, big and small, then someone else is going to make them for you – and this may be why you do not like the ‘balance’ that you have ended up with…
This is a guest post by Anna Lundberg. Anna is an independent digital marketing consultant, helping clients navigate the minefield of marketing in today’s connected world.
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“No one can tell you what to do with your life and there is no “one-size-fits-all” escape that will lead you to happiness. What does work, however, is exposure to new ideas, likeminded people and a safe environment for you to figure out what it is you really want.”
– Rob Symington, Escape the City co-founder.
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