Work/life balance? It’s all life.
People talk about work/life balance as if work and life are two separate things; like we could choose between these two different things to do. As if we could ever live less life. Or live a life totally without work.
And note people are rarely talking about putting more work into the equation. “How’s your work/life balance?”. Or “I got a new job to get a better work/life balance”. I think this might actually be code for “I want to do better work”.
When I was fresh out of law school and training to be a lawyer I worked so hard that I felt like I didn’t have a life. But when I look back on it I remember many, many good times. Travelling all over the world, parties, meeting my now-husband, all squeezed in between long and frantic stints of work. And many of my formative experiences, as a professional but also as a person, happened in that period of intense work. I worked on some very interesting cases and with some ludicrously smart people. And then again when I did my Masters, and again when I was a more senior lawyer. My work felt all consuming, but it was all part of the story of my life.
I often said I loved my job…between the hours of 9am and 7pm. After 7pm I generally didn’t like it anymore (and, if I had any energy left, I positively hated it from midnight onwards). So I said I wanted a better work/life balance. I wanted time to remember my friends’ birthdays and pay my bills and get my hair cut. I didn’t resent the work because of the long hours. I resented it because it crowded out other things I wanted to do with my time.
After qualifying as a lawyer I travelled with that man I met after law school across Africa for five months, overland from Senegal to Ghana and then from Nairobi to Cape Town. Then we came back to the UK, bought a 1970s bright orange Ford Transit campervan (which we called the “Orange Goddess”) and drove from Scotland, down through France, across the Alps to Italy, back along the riviera into Spain and then all the way back to Scotland. If that isn’t life, what is?! But it also wasn’t the opposite of work. We had many tough moments, and we did lots of things that could be categorised as work, like planning and organising and coordinating and scheduling and liaising and documenting and budgeting. If we had been doing it in some kind of professional capacity, perhaps as tour guides, then it would have been work. But since we weren’t being paid to do it, it was life.
More recently I left the legal profession, officially because I was looking for better work/life balance. I have told many people over the last couple of years that I couldn’t see continuing to partnership as compatible with having a family, or at least the kind of family life that I was envisaging. The hours, the pressure, you know? People nodded with a smile. They know.
But that’s not quite right. Family means a lot to me but it’s not the real reason I left that job. What I really meant was: I didn’t care enough about my job to sacrifice time I could spend on more rewarding activities. There I said it.
This is demonstrated by my chosen career move. Not to a part-time job or 9–5 gig. Nor have I decided to become a stay at home mother, now that I have a family, as you might expect given my stated reason for leaving law. Instead I’ve started a startup, on my own and without outside support. It’s hard work and I suspect it’s going to get harder (I am actually hoping it will because if it doesn’t then something will have gone horribly wrong).
What’s the difference? Why would I move from one stressful job to another, all in the name of balance? The difference is now I’m working on something I care about intensely. I have a broad and deep fascination with human contentment and how we can organise ourselves as a society to achieve optimal happiness, on a macro and micro scale, in a way that reduces conflict, poverty and the degradation of the environment. I myself have struggled with the question of what to do with my own life and how to spend my precious time, and I don’t think I’m the only one. This is the problem I’m trying to solve.
So this new work is high-pressured, stressful, hard work and I get paid absolutely nothing to do it (yet)! But I work from a place of hope and enthusiasm rather than apathy and dread. And I’m learning every day, about startups and design and technology and marketing and the careers industry. It’s already rewarding, and I haven’t even begun to change people’s lives on the scale that I am planning.
This has led me to wonder whether perhaps what matters is not how many hours you spend at work versus how many you spend out of work but rather what you get out of the different activities that make up your life. So if you have a very rewarding job then, subject to certain maximums, you can work many more hours than if it were less rewarding, and still feel happy. If your job is “draining” or “soul-destroying” or “mind-numbing” then there’s nothing inherently wrong with that (other than that you can do better) but that job better leave you with plenty of free time to pump yourself up with more nourishing and constructive activities to replenish what it takes from you (your soul, your mind, whatever).
Now clearly either extreme is unsustainable. Even if you love your job, working at it 24/7 is unlikely to lead to your happy place. So some kind of balance is needed, but it’s not work/life balance as we know it. Perhaps we could think of it as the give/take balance. Or the cost/benefit balance. Or the investment/reward balance. What does your work take from you, cost you or require from you in terms of investment (that is time, effort, emotions, money) versus what it gives you? And how about your other life activities? What do they give and take?
Looked at this way we acknowledge that work is just part of life, one of many ways to spend your time. Work is life, in the same way that family, friends and side-projects are life. You make friends at work. You learn and grow at work. You suffer failures and enjoy triumphs, you contribute and participate, you support and are supported.
It’s not about whether you love or hate your job, whether you’re following your passion or not. Rather perhaps we should be thinking about our allocation of time and how we spend it, overall, on a portfolio of activities to get the most out of our lives.
We can think of this as adjusting the levels of effort we put into the things that matter to us: work , family, friends, relaxation, health, fitness, self-improvement, building connections, exploring the world, peace.
And perhaps we should allow room for ourselves to reassess the relative value between different activities periodically throughout our lives. Many of us already do this but it’s often framed as a dramatic break from what we were doing before which implies some kind of failure. It doesn’t mean you were doing the wrong thing before. It just means that that job or lifestyle doesn’t work for you anymore.
Where does money come into all of this? Clearly, it is one thing that work gives you which, generally speaking, other things or people in your life do not give you (unless you are being supported by your family in some way). So we have to ask: what am I getting out of this, overall? Do the things that I can buy with the money I earn add more to my life than the things I could do with that extra time if I worked less? What about the other things I get at work, besides money? What about the monetary cost of going to work in terms of commuting, clothes, education, healthcare, outsourcing of tasks that you don’t have time to do yourself, and so on.
Really it’s a case of different activities, some of which feel more like work and some of which feel more like leisure, and weighing up the relative costs and benefits of each activity. And the more we can see opportunities for personal growth and professional growth outside of those traditional spheres the more we might come to value the different ways we help ourselves grow. Giving a speech at a friend’s wedding — well that’s working on your public speaking. Counselling a colleague about how to deal with a demanding boss — well that’s working on your empathy and human connection.
This idea is a work in progress, I haven’t got it all figured out. But taking the time to figure it out is one thing that I know I value and even though it’s not officially “work” I’m going to keep working at it.
Talk to me about how you think about balance in your life on Snapchat (videyay), Twitter (@heyvideyay) and on Anchor ⚓
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