Why everyone fails, and questions you should ask instead.
If you think about it, work-life balance is a strange aspiration for a fulfilling life. As written by Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall in Time, balance is about stasis: if we ever experienced our life in balance – parents happy, kids are taken care of, smooth work – then we would pray that everything stays just as perfect forever. However, this is impossible – or you may not get all of that at the same time.
People often imply that work is bad, and life is good; we lose ourselves in work but find ourselves in life; we survive work, but live life. Work is not the opposite of life, it is instead a part of life. Thus, we will highlight some of the biggest myths of Work-life balance, resulting in why people spend unnecessary amounts of time at work, leaving no time to have a life.
- You can have it all
This remains one of the biggest misconceptions regarding work-life balance. Even if you have created a schedule that allows you to exercise, spend time with your inner circle, and get all of your work done, you’re still going to make a sacrifice somewhere.
According to Harvard Business Review, it is hard for high-achieving people to accept the fact that they can’t have it all. Even those who recognize the limits on their time often still expect to be energetic and efficient enough to excel in every role.
It’s a natural response to our upbringings; after all, in school, we’re taught that hardworking, intelligent students can get straight A’s. But in the messy real world, it is impossible to do everything perfectly at the same time. You cannot pursue all your goals simultaneously or satisfy all your desires at once. And it’s an emotional drain to think you can. Instead, you must focus on long-term fulfillment rather than short-term success and, at various points in your life, think carefully about your priorities.
- Life needs to be compartmentalized
Another myth is that we need to compartmentalize life. According to John Rampton on Entrepreneur, for some of us, compartmentalizing life means an even 50-50 split where we spend half of our time at work, and the other half at home. For others, it’s dividing our days into 8-8-8 hour blocks. It is where we spend eight hours at work, sleep for another eight, and set aside eight hours for leisure and social activities.
The thing is that it’s not possible to evenly divide your time like this. One thing to acknowledge is that there will be days when you put in 10 hours of work, and the tradeoff is that there will be others when you will only work for a couple of hours.
Instead of forcing yourself to compartmentalize your life, devote the right amount of time to your current priorities. It’s as simple as knowing that if you’re approaching a deadline, then you may need to put in long hours working, which results in you missing out on quality time with your family and friends at the moment. However, when you pass the deadline and celebrate with a vacation, then that’s when you make up that quality time you were missing out on.
- We can segment work and personal life and not have them affect each other
As written by TalentQuarterly, employees are whole people, and work and personal life are two parts of a whole – not separate spheres. As much as we think that we can walk through our front door after a day at the office and forget about our work stressors, our brain does not possess those kinds of barriers.
In other words, if our work is energizing and uplifting, we carry positive emotions and increased capacity to perform into our roles as parents, partners, kids, family members, friends, and community members. On the contrary, when our work is exhausting and demoralizing, we tend to be stressed and it affects our ability to function outside of work.
The way to fix this is to understand that the sooner we appreciate our colleagues’ non-work commitments, the more open we will be to looking for ways to create mutual work-life gains. Leaders should set the right tone and present themselves as whole people who have commitments outside of work. This shows that leaders serve as role models who work hard while also finding ways to meaningfully engage in upholding duties outside the office, thus sending powerful signals that employees’ personal lives are valid and valued, making them relatable to the employees.
3 Questions You Should Ask Instead
Now more than ever, the pressure to perform at work is paramount and, commonly, the day doesn’t always end when you leave for home. Perhaps, the busy season has evolved into the ‘norm’ and you’re constantly working late, neglecting not only your self-care routine but the relationship with those closest to you.
An article by The Mental Health Foundation stated that one third of professionals felt unhappy/very unhappy about the time they spent at work. Furthermore, almost half of employees neglect other aspects of their life due to working long hours, increasing their vulnerability to mental health problems.
However, rather than try to achieve some sort of perfect equilibrium, these are some of the questions that you may ask yourself to get much more value.
- Is my work (still) fulfilling enough?
As written by Fast Company, if you’re constantly worried about spending too many hours in the office, it may not just be because you suddenly have tons of work to do. Rather, you may feel like you’re working too hard because your job isn’t sufficiently rewarding – monetarily or otherwise. As a result, your work experience becomes more emotionally and physically draining than it used to be. Alternatively, you might be spending more hours at the office than you need to for much the same reason: because you lack fulfillment and passion, thus making you less productive.
Rather than immediately looking for things you can cut out from your work life, try asking yourself a bigger question: “does my job truly hold meaning for me?” Maybe it used to, but your interests have changed, or the job itself has changed in a way that it does not in line with your interest anymore. Whatever the reason, be truly honest with yourself and consider whether it’s the time to seek another opportunity.
- Have I set boundaries to protect the most important part of my life?
While it is hard to make an actual separation between work and life, it is not hard to set boundaries to protect the important things that you do want to spend time on. For many people, the boundary can come in many forms; attending their son’s football match, going out for a picnic on Sunday, or making workouts a non-negotiable part of it. Whichever it is, it’s important to set boundaries so you can still have the value of your time.
Setting boundaries, according to Fast Company, can help you feel more in control of your time, and lack of control over one’s schedule is often what leads people to feel like they are falling “off-balance” in life. In other words, as described by Craig Chappelow, the more we assume actual leadership of our own lives, instead of waiting for someone else to do it for us, the better prepared we are to deal with this unending juggle.
- Are my expectations too high across the board?
We want to believe that we can spend the right amount of time at work and with our families and friends to make us happy in both spheres. However, that isn’t always the case. To excel in anything, we need to commit to certain goals while sacrificing in other areas to achieve them.
If we have big career ambitions, we may have to curtail our social life. If we want to devote more time to our family, chances are we will need to dial back on the amount of energy we’ve been pouring into professional growth. Moreover, our lives – in and outside work – go through different stages every time. We can grow and succeed like crazy in one realm, and then pivot to do the same in another later on.
So if your work-life balance feels strained, pause to ask yourself whether your expectations need to come down in one area to keep the bar high in another. After all, it’s always up to you when to move the bar again–and at what height.
At the end of the day, the question to ask is do we have to balance our roles and responsibilities? Do we have to balance our relationships? Do we have to balance the things we do for a paycheck with the things we do strictly for fun? Yes to all of the above. But we don’t balance “work” and “life”. We live. And we need to maximize our life experience wherever we are, in whatever activity we’re engaged in.
We can’t always do only what we love. But we can always find the love in what we do.
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