Why Work/Life Balance is not the Problem

Is your work and life in balance? How do you measure it? If you’re working 80 hours a week for a start-up and loving it — is your balance wrong and are you failing at life? I don’t think so.

Work is not something we do elsewhere between fixed times of day. Working from home, from hotels, in airports and cafés at all times of the day is, for many, the norm.

Business is an integral part of life; not something external governed by different rules of behaviour to those that apply to the other parts of our lives.

The expression work/life balance is really a misnomer. It suggests that work and life are two different things; that there is a set of scales with work on one side and life on the other; that work is fundamentally not to be enjoyed and life is what living is really all about.

This is clearly nonsense. It makes neither good business sense nor good life sense.

Business cannot be a ritual chore between weekends; it needs to be fun and to allow people to strive to be happy and to achieve their own ambitions as well as those of the organization.

Vital creative ideas arise in ‘non-work’ situations, when we relax and allow ourselves to dream…to make seemingly random neural connections.

Jack Welch had his vision of what he called a boundaryless General Electric sitting on a beach in Barbados with his wife. The boundaryless organization would drive the growth of GE for over a decade. Such insights happen to us all, if we let them, and inspire us to change some part of our world.

For leaders, the challenge is about creating an organization that is in harmony both with itself and with its environment — harmony not in the sense of being a fully orchestrated, prearranged, melodious score, but as an exciting blend of innovative and creative frequencies. The Agile approach to organizing work is about striving to achieve this.

An 80 work week is not the issue.

Maintaining a healthy life-life balance is what is important: Enjoying what you do; taking proper rest; eating well; exercising; talking with people who inspire you; having someone to love…whatever works for you.