Master Work Life Balance: 3 Eye-opening Tips from Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) that you should learn
To many people, work life balance is at best a good idea, or at worst a terrible modern day joke that doesn’t make anyone laugh anymore.
Or in the words of Boris Groysberg & Robin Abrahams who wrote in a March 2014 Harvard Business Review article:
“Work/life” balance is at best an elusive ideal and at worst a complete myth, today’s senior executives will tell you.”
The underlying reason for this elusiveness is that we’re constantly connected and expected to be present both for “work” and for “life” at all times; When we are at work, we’re expected to be reachable by family and friends, and when we are at home we are expected to be contactable by work and our clients.
Despite efforts of many companies to implement work life balance practices for their employees, it is the individuals themselves who are struggling with juggling their roles in a meaningful and effective way.
As part of my work to develop faith-driven professional training for individuals and corporates, I looked into the life and sayings of Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) and tried to extract practical lessons that would be beneficial for the modern day professional (Muslim or non-Muslim). But before we delve into these insights, let us explore 5 reasons why the work life balance is so hard to master.
Why is Work-Life balance so hard to achieve?
5 Challenges to Work Life Balance that makes it impossible to implement
There are 5 challenges that are driving the work life balance debate and making it hard for the modern day professional to master:
1. It’s subjective
Modern day work life balance is based primarily on expectations. For an executive who works 50–60 hours per week but makes it a point to be home for dinner at 6pm every evening; is he considered to have “mastered” work/life balance? Perhaps from the executive’s point of view he might be proud of himself for being home for dinner every night, but his spouse or children might not appreciate that work occupies 80% of his time. Or consider the case of a working mother, who’s torn between her career and her family. Who decides if she has achieved “work/life balance”?
2. It’s transient
Work Life balance is not fixed. It changes with seasons and with every stage of our lives. You may be able to achieve some form of work/life balance when you have one child, you’re a junior staff, and you don’t have much responsibilities on your plate. But try to have work life balance with 3 kids, a demanding job, a mortgage to pay off, and being involved in so many other extra curricular activities.
3. It’s not Measurable
How do we even begin measuring work life balance? Is there a metric or scoring system that tells us how well we’re doing on the work life balance continuum? Are the number of hours spent on family vs. work vs. personal activities sufficient to measure our work life balance effectiveness? What about the quality of those hours? These questions and more make work life balance debate even harder.
4. It emphasizes “work” as larger than life
The whole idea that there’s “work” and then there’s “life” is problematic at many levels. Firstly, it assumes that work is the center of our lives and everything else is peripheral and on the side. Secondly, it assumes that work can never be integrated with life but there’s a Chinese wall between them. As Dr.Stewart Friedman argues in his book Leading the Life You Want: Skills for Integrating Work and Life; the idea that “work” competes with “life” ignores the more nuanced reality of our humanity — the interaction of four domains: work, home, community, and the private self. The goal is to create harmony among them instead of thinking only in terms of trade-offs.
5. It’s hard to plan for
Let’s be honest: you can plan the most balanced lifestyle, giving due time to every role you have, but reality always wins. Whether it’s that last minute emergency meeting at 4pm that disturbs your dinner plans, or rushing to the hospital in the middle of a client meeting because your child had an injury at school. Life keeps throwing stuff at us that makes it impossible for us to manage and truly have a balanced lifestyle.
By now, you might think to yourself “well, what’s the point of even trying to balance work and life?”. I’m hoping the insights below from Prophet Muhammad would help.
3 Key Lessons from Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) that solve the above challenges
When one observes the daily routine of Prophet Muhammad (pbuh), one cannot resist but notice how balanced & effective it was during his life. This is the man who in 23 years changed the face of humanity with his mission, yet we never hear complaints from his family or companions that “he was too busy” or “didn’t have enough time for us”.
Although one can argue that the Prophet did not have a 9–5 job, nor did he face half the challenges and distractions we’re facing in our modern day lives, however we can still extract key lessons from his life that are applicable for us today:
Lesson 1: Scrap Work Life Balance and instead focus on Total Life Balance
The Prophet (pbuh) once heard that one of his companions was fasting everyday and spending all night in prayer. The Prophet (pbuh) made a point to go visit him and advise him not to do this. Here’s what he told him:
“…I have been told that you stand all night (in prayer) and fast all day.’ I said: ‘Yes (I do).’ He said: ‘Do not do that. Sleep and stand (in prayer); fast and break your fast. For your eyes have a right over you, your body has a right over you, your body has a right over you, your wife has a right over you, your guest has a right over you, and your friend has a right over you…” (Sunan an-Nasa’i 2391)
What fascinates me about this incident is how the Prophet made it a point to go visit the man and advise him to stop. Even though the man was engaged in devotional acts of worship which we’d think the Prophet would be pleased about.
The key lesson for us is that instead of thinking of work life balance in terms of what others expect from us, we should think of work life balance in terms of fulfilling rights: The rights of our body, the rights of our mind, the rights of our families, the rights of our friends, and of course, the rights of our workplaces.
Once we shift our thinking of work life balance from subjective/idealistic notions to rights of others (& ourselves) it becomes very clear and intuitive where to draw the line between the different parts of our lives and how to balance our lives given the circumstances. The elegance of this is that it takes away the guilt associated normally with work life balance e.g. If we know that we’ve fulfilled the rights of our workplace, then we shouldn’t feel guilty if we leave by 5pm just because everyone else expects us to stay longer.
To implement this lesson in practice, we need to firstly identify the different roles that we play in our lives and then understand what rights do each of these roles/entities have upon us.
Lesson 2: Be a shepherd across all your roles
The lesson about fulfilling rights above may seem to imply that as long as we fulfill the bare minimum rights to those around us then we’re considered to have succeeded in life. Yet another cornerstone lesson that the Prophet (pbuh) taught his followers is to look at our roles from the point of view of responsibility. He (pbuh) said:
“Each of you is a shepherd and each of you is responsible for his flock. The amir (ruler) who is over the people is a shepherd and is responsible for his flock; a man is a shepherd in charge of the inhabitants of his household and he is responsible for his flock; a woman is a shepherdess in charge of her husband’s house and children and she is responsible for them; and a man’s slave is a shepherd in charge of his master’s property and he is responsible for it. So each of you is a shepherd and each of you is responsible for his flock.” (Sunan Abi Dawud)
If you think about a shepherd, his role is not just to do the bare minimum of keeping the flock alive. His role is to nurture and to grow his flock and make sure they thrive — and not just survive.
The following passage from my new book “The Productive Muslim: Where Faith Meets Productivity” explains this concept further:
If you think about what a shepherd does, he doesn’t simply protect the flock, he nurtures and develops them. He searches for new pastures, tends to the sick, ensures that young ones are taken care of, etc. It’s not a passive responsibility but a very active role… Imagine a parent thinking they are fulfilling their responsibility of educating their children by simply taking them to school. Is this person fulfilling the role of [shepherd] of his children? To be a true [shepherd], a parent needs not only to be concerned with their children’s attendance, but also their growth and development as productive citizens. He/she needs to check what they were taught in school, how they are doing in their homeworks, the manners they are learning, etc. This is how we fulfil in part our trusteeship of our children.
With this concept in mind — the conversation regarding work life balances again shifts away from subjective, debatable allocations of time, but towards the quality of our time that we spend to nurture and develop those around us and those who have rights upon us.
Speaking of quality, here’s the 3rd lesson from Prophet Muhammad (pbuh)..
Lesson 3: It’s all about the quality time
There’s a long narration in the books of hadeeth (sayings of Prophet Muhammad) that I never understood until recently. It describes a long account that Ayisha (r) is sharing with the Prophet about 11 women who tell each other about their husbands’ qualities. Ayisha (r) goes through each of the 11 women and recounts in detail what each person said. The last story was about a woman called Um Zar who described her husband in positive terms and had no complaints about him. The Prophet (pbuh) said: “I am to you as Abu Zar was to his wife Um Zar.” (Sahih Bukhari).
I used to scratch my head and try to understand the point of this narration. It made no sense to me until recently. A scholar explained that the point of this story is to showcase how attentive, present, and a good listener the Prophet (pbuh) was to his family.
Sometimes when we talk about work life balance we tend to think how much time we’re spending at home, at work, or with our friends. But if are 50% at home (mentally) when we are at work, and 50% at work (mentally) when we are at home, then no wonder we constantly feel stressed and not able to keep up.
The ability to be focused and 100% engaged in everything we do is a key characteristic of successful leaders who show case how important the people around them are and hence even if the leader does get busy, the people around them would understand.
Summary & Conclusion
Work life balance may seem elusive to many people, yet if we apply the key lessons above, namely: shifting the conversation from subjective work life debates to fulfilling rights and responsibilities and being present with those around us, we’ll make a huge stride in achieving a total life balance that we can all agree on.
Webinar Recording: Work Life Balance from a Prophetic Perspective
The following is a recording of a webinar I held recently which addresses Muslim Professionals on this topic of Work Life Balance from a Prophetic Perspective. It contains more practical tips on the notes made above that help modern professionals tackle work life balance from a Prophetic perspective:
Connect Deeper
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1-Day Workshop in Dallas, TX (April 30th)
If you liked this article and want to learn more about how the Prophet’s life applies to our modern day productivity and leadership challenges, then you should join me and Omar Usman for a 1-day workshop, at the end of April, at the Westin DFW Hotel. Click the following link to learn more: http://productivemuslim.com/barakaheffect-dallas/
