Ditch your quest for work-life balance and embrace Ikigai.
Seriously. Why do we work so hard to achieve a balance between work and our home lives?
Why does one have to compete with the other?
Is there a way for us to start accepting that there is no balance? That it’s all connected?
Maybe all of this energy we’re spending on trying to achieve it could be spent on just doing the best we can on the tasks that we have to hand at the time?
Maybe we could all just focus our attention on what gets us out of bed each day.
So why have we let it get this way?
It’s been a strong topic for over 10 years which means that for a long time in society, we’ve all been trying to figure out how to achieve work-life balance. It often refers to the time that we spend on different aspects of our lives.
With the rise of cheap, portable technology and the willingness of companies to hand this out to employees, we all started to take our work home, check email from our phones, even whilst on holiday.
I would check my email from bed as soon as I woke up at one agency I worked for because I worked with two different timezones and wanted to see if there were any problems I needed to deal with before my day had even started.
Companies changed their policies and started to introduce measures to attract talent in this new world: flexi-time; unlimited holiday; desk sharing, work from home, but if the work culture still had a strong devotion to presenteeism about it, then workers simply moved from being in the office all of the time to being online all of the time.
My own quest for work-life balance.
I was working long hours as a project manager and I wanted to impress the company I worked for dearly because it meant I might progress in my career. I also found I wasn’t taking holiday or thinking about anything other than work in my downtime hours.
It never occurred to me that my colleagues with kids might have struggled with the devotion to work outside of the building until I became that person. I found after I returned to work the first time after having baby that I struggled to split my time between my life as a mother, a wife and a worker.
60 hours work weeks, 3–4 hours commuting a day, deadlines, travel, management, calls, planning, executing, shopping, nappies, nursery,
In the meantime my children needed their mother, the house needed cleaning, the cat needed shots, I was feeling unwell, I needed a holiday.
Realising it wasn’t just my employer’s responsibility.
I had to start asking for better flexibility on working hours within my role in order to “do it all.” I was good at asking and met with little resistance in the beginning. There are a lot of great businesses that want to try and help this changing face of the workforce.
I was inspired by the women at the top talking about their own work-life balance struggles. Sheryl Sandberg “came out” with the fact that she started to leave the office loudly:
“I was showing everyone I worked for that, I worked just as hard. I was getting up earlier to make sure they saw my emails at 5:30, staying up later to make sure they saw my emails late. But now I’m much more confident in where I am and so I’m able to say, “Hey! I am leaving work at 5:30.” And I say it very publicly, both internally and externally.”
The rise of discussion about work-life balance increased. “Lean-in” (thanks to Sheryl) became a go-to term for how women could accomplish this.
I would loudly leave to go and pick my kids up, but I wasn’t part of the evening drinks where the team bonded and the boss paid for the drinks. I had to attend to the baby crying, rather than jump on a Skype call. I’d be checking my phone for emails rather than talking to my daughter while she splashed in the bath. I could work from home but it meant I couldn’t manage a team. I worked extra hours in the evening to catch-up.
Mum guilt kicked in. Employee guilt kicked in harder.
Mindfulness apps, structuring the time in my calendar, deleting apps from my phone, begging and borrowing favours to cover childcare, they all helped a bit but the real problem wasn’t me and my management of my time.
No amount of flexi-time or working from home would help me manage this new life because I was so conditioned to being present at work all of the time. Orchestrating teams to build great products is all I ever wanted to do as I came up the ranks and I realised how lucky I was to be in the position of being able to do this as a women in her thirties with kids.
If I stopped, would I lose my status, my job, my ability to progress?
There were plenty of “me, 15 years ago” workers waiting to take my place. They were working the hours on and offline because they could. They had the time.
Business owners won’t always challenge the way things are if it’s making them money. Yahoo’s Marissa Meyer famously banned 12,000 employees from working from home, citing a decrease in engagement and productivity. It’s business first for companies and they are slow to set the precedence for flexible working if it costs them productivity.
How can it change?
Workers are expected to put in more hours in order to keep up with the fast pace of their careers; be present in our offices despite the rise in effective remote working tools; put our kids into childcare, but with a higher-than-ever cost and do it with less support with family life; do “memory-making” things with the kids while as women, still doing the lioness’ share of the work at home.
Feeling pressure to perform to the very highest standard all of the areas of your life is just insanity. It’s no wonder than burnout (especially for working parents) is on the rise.
Instead we should start to focus on our inner Ikigai 生き甲斐, a Japanese concept meaning “a reason for being.” It is used to indicate the source of value in your life or as the rough translation reveals: “the reason for which you wake up in the morning”.
Finding Your Ikigai
Looking at the tasks you have in front of your for the day and realising some are work, some are for home and some are for family but all of them are things you‘re good at means you stop trying to balance and just do them because you don’t have think about them much. We all often enjoy the things we’re good.
Maybe you love work. Like really love what you do and it fulfils you, deeply but it’s not what the world (or your family) needs. You might not feel fulfilled. Reaching a state of Ikigai means that you’ll be willing to see if you can blend those areas of your life together.
Maybe you’re not very well off or have a job that only just pays the bills but happy and content with your family and your relationships. You want more.
Finding your Ikigai means a willingness to try and fill that part of your life without hesitation.
You stop fighting the balance of work-life and realise it’s all life.
For questions define Ikigai:
- What do I love?
- What am I good at?
- What can I be paid for now — or something that could transform into my future hustle?
- What does the world need?
It’s changed my entire outlook regarding my work life, my career, my family and my home.
It made me realise that chasing a career at the expense of a more fulfilling home life was not worth it. I had to come to terms that I didn’t even want the balance I was seeking.
It’s also made me realise that the work I was doing wasn’t even work I wanted to do. Helping small businesses in my new start-up venture is much more fulfilling than anything I have ever done in the past.
In my self-employed life, I work late, sure, but it’s work I’m good at and I love and it means I get to spend more time with my family. It’s also doing something that I hope will meaningfully help those starting out in their own business.
Maybe I have found my Ikigai…
Thanks for reading!
I’m Vicki Jakes, a digital woman, feminist, mother lady. I am using Medium to write about my journey from employee to business-owner whilst parenting two small daughters and hoping to help a few people along the way.
