Consider these two scenarios:
Person A is an extremely busy person right now. He loves what he does. He has just taken on a mega project at work, the accomplishing of which he thinks can significantly upgrade his career prospects. He has been managing a team this past year and has slowly and surely got them to gel together into a well-oiled unit, one that is up for this challenge. As he approaches the crunch time and the project deadline nears, he has to grind the hours. They inevitably spill over into the evening and occasional weekend. He skips his family dinner, his squash time with his best friend, and his child’s school event. As he looks at the clock on a demanding evening, he sighs and wonders why his life now outside work has to take all the hits for the life inside his office walls.
Person B is also an extremely busy person. He is a dedicated family man, an active member of his religious community and a ready and reliable ally to all his friends in need of advice or support. His time is currently consumed attending to the needs of others and he is comfortable in that role. Of course, he also works to make ends meet, but only just to meet those ends. Life for him right now is all about the circles of family, friends and community who are around him. And their demands and requests are not trivial. Still, he does have that nagging feeling, that fleeting thought that surfaces in his consciousness time after time like a fish’s head which bobs up and below the surface of the water. It could be putting more hours at work to get that overdue raise, or dusting off that business plan drawn out years ago, or trying his hand at a skill he had neglected since graduating college. Surveying his landscape, he sighs and tells himself that it will have to wait for a better time.
The two scenarios are not altogether uncommon, though you may argue that one is more common than the other perhaps. Still, in between these two scenarios is what society recognizes as the hallowed ground, the sacred space, the sweet spot. Otherwise known as the work-life balance. Where there is an equilibrium between what is personal and what is career.
There is only one small problem though. It doesn’t really exist.
Work-Life: A False Distinction
Yes, work is not all there is to life. But work is also not not life. Work is a part of life, an important one. And recognizing this fact in no way undermines other aspects of your life that your value and cherish. It is much a part of life as family, friends, religion, community, recreation, hobbies and others.
Work is one avenue of your generativity, your productivity, your contribution to society. A significant subsection of your time on Earth is spent in this activity. Understanding the place that work has in our existence requires us to take a holistic view of our lives and see how each component fits in with the rest.
Assuming that work should be walled off from the personal life in a sense depersonalizes work. Our interactions with our colleagues, struggles with our supervisors or guidance received from them, the sweat and toil and stress and triumph, all of these can be deeply personal. How can they not?
But even if in our grand life equation, we intentionally do not want work to play that big a part, then the entire ‘work-life’ distinction may actually give a disproportionate emphasis to work to begin with. So from several standpoints, work-life balance can be a highly misleading approach.
Seeking Life-Balance
The work-life balance has risen to become a sort of ultimate ideal of time management, to be aspired to but rarely to be achieved and even then for not long. Its near mythical status in our list of unwritten social rules also plants the seeds of dissatisfaction in a good chunk of the workforce. After all, if they reflect on their own work-life and find some perceived shortcoming, such as consistent late hours at the office or home issues affecting their work time commitments, they assume that they have fallen short of society’s gold standard.
In many ways, the work-life balance is a cultural relic of the 20th century, when models for work and society tended to mirror industrial grade packaging and standardization. As we have entered the fourth industrial revolution, we need models that are more adaptable and reflective of ground reality.
Rather than work-life balance, perhaps we should consider only life-balance. What makes a balanced life? It is hard to give a particular prescribed formula, but speaking generally, we can say a balanced life is one in which the time spent ultimately reflects the values of the person, such as faith, responsibility, etc. These values then guide our immediate and future priorities, which translate into short term and long term goals. So if your time is consumed in activities towards pursuing goals which represent your priorities which are steered by your values, then yes, you are living a balanced life. This is regardless of whether that time is work or non-work related. Of course, not all time will be spent in such a way, but to the degree you do, your life is balanced.
It is worth mentioning that while our values tend to remain constant for most of our lives, our priorities do change based on circumstances. Which is why as a coach, I try and understand not just the goals my client wants to accomplish but the values that animate them and the priorities that drive these goals.
An imbalance is created if your time is consumed by achieving goals that do not connect to your priorities at that point. If your priority is financial security or harmony at home, and your time is spent elsewhere, then your life risks being imbalanced.
A Middle Ground?
The above disregard for the work-life balance framing shouldn’t necessarily be seen as a license to excessively burn the midnight oil at work for the sake of it. Rather, you may need to take the time to look at the big picture and figure if your time distribution maps out well to your own life priorities.
Normally, those close to us will inform us first of any perceived time imbalances in how we are conducting ourselves day to day, well before they come to our own attention. But we should be wary of viewing any disproportionate time given to one area of life as an imbalance.
As Gary Keller discusses in his book The One Thing, as much as we have exalted the idea of seeking a middle ground in everything, some of life’s most important works come from our extremes. In other words, there may well come points when your priorities can justify a seeming excess of time commitment. Once you know your priorities with clarity, you can commit to such tasks guilt-free.
You instantly acknowledge this when it comes to a loved one being seriously ill and needing tending to. The priorities then are very clear and time surely justified. But other points of life may demand time from you for cultivating your talents, building a community, producing a masterpiece, growing a family or whatever potential milestone lies ahead. When that point comes, be prepared to pour the hours, days, weeks and years to getting the job done.
What may appear then as an imbalanced work-life may in reality be the most balanced life you can lead.
(Article originally appeared at: https://saqib-m-sh.medium.com/there-is-no-work-life-balance-there-is-only-life-balance-fe8785fb3bd3)