Recent times have led to dramatic shifts in how we work, especially our awareness of work-life balance.
But what does this really mean, and is there any way to find a balance in all of it? Here’s 5 thoughts for you to consider.
Define balance
First thing’s first: balance is a strange term to describe the relationship between our life and profession.
The word “balance” makes it seem like they’re supposed to be equal, but in what category?
Time?
Effort?
Money?
Bagels?
Most people define work-life balance as a measure of “time” but I prefer the idea of “investment” more.
If you think of work-life balance as an investment it’s easier to treat it as something you have control over instead of something you’re supposed to do “right” (whatever that means).
I’d like to rebrand the entire concept as Work-Life Harmony.
Has a nice ring to it, right?
Work-Life Harmony gives you freedom to find something that works for YOU. The right investment in each category depends on where you are in life.
On both sides of the work-life coin are valid reasons to spend more time on that side over the other. For example,
- Work: Highly successful careers and businesses typically require (a lot) more than 40 hours per week. This can’t be done without sacrificing a fair amount of leisure time.
- Life: Children don’t usually wish their parents spent less time with them. Work less so you can spend more time with family.
Unfortunately it’s difficult to define “balance” when you don’t know what you’re trying to do, which leads me to my second point…
Get clear on your work-life strategy
We all live life in a series of seasons, each with different priorities, themes, and people.
When we’re young, life is usually about friendships, family, and schooling. We care most about learning who we are, fitting in, and passing Algebra II.
After high school, a lot of us are trying to figure out what we’re supposed to do with our life. Many are dating, some married, and others are already raising children.
Each season of life brings a new flavor of challenges, desires and rewards.
I believe the right investment in each side of the work-life coin depends on what you’re trying to accomplish in your current season of life.
For example, I left a full time position as a software engineer to become the founder of a technology company. To have any chance at success I had to double down on discipline and spend a lot more time working. This also meant sacrificing “life” stuff that came up in favor of investing in my work.
Was that a balance? Absolutely not.
Was it necessary to move through that season of life and fulfill my priorities? Definitely!
Tuning your work-life balance is critical for achieving your biggest goals in life. The irony for me was that “working” led to a more fulfilling “life”, but at the cost of short-term imbalance.
Let me repeat that.
To get where I wanted to go in life, I had to purposefully live an imbalanced work-life balance.
For some this means spending far less time on a career to be a very involved parent or friend. Others may truly seek to invest equally in both camps.
Sometimes we create an imbalance unknowingly.
If you don’t have a North Star goal or strategy, your work-life balance is usually reactive to the environment around you. Gain clarity around your goals in life to define a harmony that helps you achieve them and take control over how you invest your finite resources.
Work-life is a continuum to improve, not an equation to balance
Work-life balance exists to serve two outcomes:
- Becoming satisfied
- Achieving your life strategy, as discussed
The point of achieving work-life balance isn’t to “be balanced”, but rather to reach one of those two outcomes. Balance for the sake of balance isn’t much of an achievement, but finding a balance/harmony that leads to satisfaction or achievement is far more intriguing.
Most people think of work-life balance as a pendulum: placing more of yourself into one side reduces the other side.
But work-life balance is a continuum to improve, not an equation to balance.
Think of it like this:
Overall Satisfaction = WORK satisfaction + LIFE satisfaction
This is a mindset shift. Instead of robbing Peter to pay Paul, we can shower Peter AND Paul with generous investments to raise the entire ocean of satisfaction!
Not to ignore that we only have so much energy to give to both, but rather to think of balance in terms of quality (moments, experiences, opportunities) instead of quantity (time, money).
Imbalance is a journey, not a destination, and the reality is that life and work are symbiotic: life impacts work and work impacts life. Positivity trickles throughout each just as much as negativity and stress.
To “balance” them without remembering their interdependence is pure fantasy – they are wound up together and usually rise and fall in the macro.
Learn to navigate yourself and the environment
Of course, we aren’t operating in a bubble. The realities of life and culture around us have a significant impact on work-life balance. There are three main considerations here:
- Your workplace
- Your friends and family
- You
First, your workplace plays a major role in your capability to execute any specific work-life balance strategy. The advent of remote work for many people also led to a huge gap in time management skills. Many of us find ourselves in more meetings than ever before and a large temptation to stay connected to our workplace through email and chat throughout the entire day, even after hours.
Microsoft found that workers more engaged in these mediums were also less satisfied than their counterparts who learned to restrict digital obligations.
If the goal is higher satisfaction in both categories, learning where you are happiest with your workplace commitments in the digital age is a key item to study.
Second, your inner circle and family play a large role. The “right” answer for how much to invest in time with friends and family will be different for everyone, but most people are reactive, not proactive, in this realm.
A lot of people place their dreams, careers, and desires on the backburner because their friends and family would rather they spent time with them. While this works out in the short term (for the friends and family), it can have negative long term effects on everyone, especially you, in the form of regret, resentment, and bitterness.
I’m not suggesting you should be an absent parent or obstinate lover, but being present for everyone else all the time at the expense of your own ambitions and desires has a steep opportunity cost.
Again, it requires harmony and balance. The greatest tools for these discussions are:
- Clarity on what you want to do
- Expectation management for what each season of life could look like
- Why pursuit of something that creates imbalance is worthwhile
Lastly, but certainly not least, is yourself. A recent study found that you tend to treat work-life balance the same as your parents, specifically your father (if you are a man) or your mother (if you are a woman).
What does this mean?
If your dad worked long hours, nights, and weekends then you probably find that to be acceptable and normal. Those with a “traditional” home, where one parent was a breadwinner and the other stayed at home or worked part-time, often find themselves in a similar situation.
Studying your tendencies helps you become more aware of the systems you naturally gravitate to as well as teach you a crucial lesson:
Just because you find something normal and acceptable doesn’t mean it is the only right answer to the work-life balance.
There are a lot of right answers, many of which depend on what you’re trying to accomplish. Understanding that what you’re familiar with (or even actively practicing) isn’t the only way can unblock any limiting beliefs you might have about how to execute your strategy.
Treat balance as a budget
I treat work-life balance the same way I treat a budget: sometimes it makes sense to invest in one place over another, and other times it’s better to balance and save.
And just like money, the way you allocate resources changes over time, sometimes daily.
Although balance is a lot more than time, time is the most concrete resource we can measure and evaluate. Effort and quality are much harder to quantify.
Think about it this way – everyone has the same 1,440 minutes in a day, and we can all spend them only 1 minute at a time. On top of that, we only have a limited amount of days, and so do all the people around us.
This creates urgency to make the most of what we spend it on, and a temptation to add more to the so-called “life” bucket over work since “work will always be there”.
I wouldn’t say there’s anything wrong or misleading about that, but it’s a point of view used in a way that treats “work” like it carries very low value. In reality, there’s a lot of people who find harmony in “work” that benefits society at large and makes a huge difference.
Think about the public service of the blue-collar workforce, or the social systems in place, or the volunteer programs that exist as “work” for some but “life” for others. Where would we be if everyone chose to balance their budget day after day and not willingly enter seasons of “work” that lead to job creation, innovation, and the evolution of our species?
Just like a budget, every decision with how you spend your time comes with an opportunity cost: spending an afternoon at work means sacrificing that same afternoon with your children. Traveling multiple times for leisure means lost productivity on a project or professional obligation.
And we never know what the right answer was until later, if at all.
The lesson is this: life has no rehearsal and is defined by how you spend your time, energy, and resources. Harmony is greater than balance because it allows you to capitalize on the moments and relationships that matter the most for your goals and desires in the season of life and work that you’re currently in.