Millennials Guide to Achieving Work-Life Balance
I read 10 books on work-life balance and this is what I learned
A few days ago, one of the interns at my firm raised an interesting question — given that you often have to work for more than 10 hours a day, how do you maintain a proper balance between your professional and personal life?
For me, the concept of work-life balance has always been something of a sensitive subject. In simple words, calling it work/life balance automatically implies that one of the two is negative and we need to balance it with the other. This, as an idea, is not something that I can easily digest. Therefore, I have always kept myself away from answering this.
So, by default, I told the intern some of the standard answers that my seniors have given me in past.
But the answers didn’t sit well with me. I finally wanted to address it
How do you truly achieve work-life balance?
The Questions: In my hunt for the true meaning of work-life balance, I first went to this website that I have enjoyed using in the last few months — Answer the Public. It primarily shows the searches people are doing related to a specific keyword. I typed in work-life balance and below I have added the results that I got:
As you can see, people have been asking almost every possible question related to work-life balance. Starting from what is work-life balance to how is work-life balance in Amazon, the internet is filled with these questions implying a need for better answers.
The Answers: To find some answers, I turned to the bible and the bible says:
Genesis 2:2- “And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made”
So what does this imply?
It tells us that even God needed some rest after working so hard for six days. So if the mightly lord did, who are we to not take a break after working our ass off.
The hunt for more answers: Then I turned to some other books on the subject and found a bunch of highly recommended authors. I read a total of 10 books over 25 days with every book presenting the author’s personal view on how to achieve work-life balance.
While I don’t really like promoting books on Medium (I believe that there are several other good platforms for this), I would still recommend 1 book out of the many I read on the subject. The one book that I enjoyed the most was The 4-Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferriss. While the reviews for the book are not too good and I do agree that the tone of the author is a bit too direct, however, the book provides something that none of the other books did — it gives an easy to follow, step-by-step, guide to achieving work-life balance.
I was familiar with many of them, having a managerial background, but still found plenty of interesting information to make it worth my while. He gives you not just the theory, but the web addresses and the exact plan for setting up your own online business and mini-retirement-lifestyle.
I did some more research on the subject. I found tons of articles with a number of them presenting similar points. Now, I don’t want this article to be one of those long articles, therefore, I will just add some of the most interesting things that I found on the subject and I leave the rest for you to decide:
Takeaway 1: Have a process in place
Here is the most imperfect image that perfectly summarises the concept of work-life balance and the need to have a system in place to deal with work-life balance:
Takeaway 2: Don’t consider work and life to be 2 separate entities
Takeaway 3: Family and friends are important
Takeaway 4: Have a list of best practices to achieve better balance but don’t expect to tick off everything on the list every day.
Do what works for you!!!
After doing all my research, I realized that work and life are two sides of the same coin. We needn’t be able to balance them every day and we shouldn’t even try to balance. Some days, work will be the only thing you do and on other days, the rest of life will take priority. The most important thing to always keep in mind is — Never lose track of work while enjoying the rest of life or vice versa.
