If You Want Work/Life Balance, Stop Chasing It

The thing is, most of us, whether we admit it or not, are trudging along, trying to eke our way through another week until the glory of the weekend reveals itself to us. Or at least until 5ish when we can have a beer.

Believe me, I know the feeling. I have spent many days in cubicles and offices just watching the clock tick down until I could get out of that godforsaken place. I have also been fortunate to be in positions where I got to be out and about during the day and not be stuck in an office.

But as fantastic as that sounds to those of you reading this from your perfectly square, chest high, carpeted chunk of earth that you occupy for a third of your life, it wasn’t any better than where you are because I told myself it wasn’t. I told myself I was still “working for the man” because I wasn’t doing something that I loved, or even liked a lot of days. Sure, I had more good days than bad but I was still just going through the motions, scratching around for that ever elusive work-life balance.

But I realized a while back that work-life balance is a myth, an El Dorado that we should all stop looking for today.

As depressing as that sounds, it’s actually not. Because work life balance implies that those two ideas should get equal time. But unless you are Marissa Mayer working 120 hours a week without sleeping, (hi Marissa, thanks for reading!), then I doubt you work the same number of hours each week that you don’t work.

Walk and talk with me for a minute:

There are 168 hours in a week.

You likely work 40–50 of those hours, right?

(And look, I have worked many 60+ hour weeks so to those of you in that boat I will just say this:

I hope that you are

A. making a short term sacrifice for a long term gain

B. you really, truly, deep down love what you do

or

C. you are some kind of sentient artificial intelligence which, in that case, I am a huge fan of yours and I promise I will not resist when the robot takeover begins so you can spare me.

If none of those are true I will only tell you that there is actually a world out there where you don’t have to work like that. Amirite former Big Green Machiners?)

But I digress. So that means you don’t work 118–128 hours per week. Sounds like the “not working hours” have it by a long shot!

Even if we take out 7–8 sleeping hours a day that still leaves you with 62–79 non-working hours per week.

So why is it that everyone is chasing the ever elusive white whale of “work-life balance” when it’s already balanced in our favor? I believe it’s because we are looking at the two entirely wrong.

I read an article a while back that talked about the idea of “work-life harmony.” Now that may sound like some hippie-dippie idea that belongs in a list of HR buzz words, and maybe it is. But the idea really struck me because I had been looking at my work and non-work lives from an angry, bitter lens.

Any time that work interfered with my “life” I would get angry and think “how dare these employees or my boss not respect me! I don’t call them on their days off and I am mad that they call me on mine.”

I have discussed this before but I have had, what I considered at the time, to be bigger jobs than what I have right now. I managed locations that were open ungodly hours, every day of the year. So, while that might not apply to you, you have probably been contacted in some form or fashion on a day off or vacation and can probably relate.

But when I found myself getting calls, texts, etc. on my days off I would immediately be filled with resentment and anger because I wanted “my” time to live my life, which I considered the time when I wasn’t at work.

When I read about this “work-life harmony” idea though it literally gave me a whole new outlook on life, both at work and not. When I looked back on my career I realized that I had not been productively working every second of the time I was at work. I know that’s shocking to all of you out there who work from the second you clock in to the second you slide down that dinosaur tail.

But not me, I have used my fair share of work time to do non-work things. Like going to the Dr. or calling Hot Wife. Or going to one of my kids’ activities. Or reading mind-blowing blog posts from “America’s hottest up and coming writer.” I don’t know who that last person is but if the title is vacant then feel free to find a worthy, hilarious, bald guy from TN to apply it to.

So when I realized this, that I had been weaving my personal life into my work life already it gave me a truly new outlook on how the two fit together.

Work and life don’t have to be on the scales of fate, stacked evenly, and if one side gets unbalanced we have to hurriedly scurry to rebalance them. No, they are more like a wave that ebbs and flows, sometimes being at the high point and others at the low.

Because, there will be times when work takes up an inordinate amount of your time. Especially if you are an entrepreneur, have a big job or a side hustle, then you will spend more time working during certain days, weeks, months than you will at other times. Even if you are not in those categories there will be times where you have to stay late, work mandatory overtime or answer an email on the weekend.

I would also venture a guess that sometimes you will answer those calls or emails from your child’s soccer game, or from your parents’ house on a holiday, or from a beach somewhere. And when you do those things, I hope you do it with a smile and think about how great it is to have a job that allows you to pay for that travel, provide for your family, or use that cell phone from wherever you are.

Because I guarantee there are a lot of people in this country and on this planet that would trade places with you in a heartbeat.

Originally published at dadletteroffice.com on August 7, 2018.