There is no ‘Work-Life Balance’ — there’s just Life

Have you ever been told, “you need to be more professional at work”?

I’ve never been a fan of the concept of ‘work-life balance’. I find it insinuates that ‘work’ and ‘life’ are two separate things. This notion leads to all kinds of misguided mentalities — “you need to be more professional at work” — “there’s no place for that in the office”.

Let’s get one thing clear. We have just one life. Not a ‘work’ life and ‘personal’ life, just one.

The idea that people are capable of dividing themselves into two has to stop. This dichotomy of work-life is both misleading and damaging.

If you include the average commute, we spend almost a third of our week at work. Another third sleeping and the final third is generally filled with chores, cooking, looking after kids, etc. Work takes up a huge portion of our time, it doesn’t need to be treated like dead-weight — a bad tumor that needs to be cut-off in the pursuit of the ‘American dream’.

Whether we like it or not, we don’t have a ‘work/life’ switch — I can’t walk into the office and hit pause on worrying about my sick son at home for the next 8 hours, our minds don’t work like that. They aren’t some sorting house, carefully labeling events to make our bosses’ lives easier.

Its just ‘life’

The reality is, our personal stuff affects work and visa versa. Both positively and negatively. A great day in the office can have me coming home on ‘cloud nine' and a tough morning getting my son ready may have me distant when I get into the office.

The notion that we are supposed to just put everything aside, flip a switch and turn up to work 100% consistently every day, is a fantasy. A fairy tale that we must stop telling ourselves and expecting from others.

Leaders of organizations play a vital role and many need to get better at facilitating this. Why not allow people to bring their kids to work if they’re at home sick from daycare — or even better, ditch daycare altogether and bring your kids to work every day!

Facilitating flexible hours and working remotely are common examples of this, but that’s just one aspect. I love seeing organizations take this further, fully remote companies, bring your pets and children to work, choose your own working hours and even unlimited leave — this should really be the norm, not the exception.

Obviously this is all dependent on the job, not all roles is all this possible. But for many it is and technology has made this even easier to do so — I for one, did a conference call the other day whilst out for a walk with my son.

But I also think there’s a flip side to this, we as people — co-habitants of the one place we all call home, earth — could do a better job at being more accomodating of this. For example, why can’t a plumber have their kid with them at work? Why can’t they drive around visiting people’s houses with their daughter or son? Only our mentality is stopping this in many cases. Even as consumers we have a place to play, to be more patient and to have empathy — this means being more patient if they took a bit longer to help fix your sink because they had their child with them. They deserve to have that kind of flexibility as much as we do.

I began writing this roughly 4 months ago, pre-coronavirus world, in a spontaneous rant but the current climate has sure given many organizations and people a real shock with this notion.

With many businesses forced to close the offices, and many of us being told to stay at home we’ve been thrown into a world where weekdays blur into weekends and the lack of physical separation between ‘work’ and ‘home’ has shown many the fallacy that is ‘work-life balance’.

As my colleague said to me the other day:

“It’s not work-life balance anymore, it’s work-life integration.”

So true. But ‘work’ and ‘life’ have never been separate things, it’s just become more apparent in this climate.

As devastating as this pandemic is, many great things have come from crisis and I hope this one serves as a wake-up call for many people to stop the tugger-war between ‘work’ and ‘life’. Don’t get me wrong there will always be compromises of course but we can do much better at removing the dichotomy and embracing life as a whole.

Taking it further

I for one have been fortunate to have experienced working at a company where ‘work’ and ‘life’ completely integrated. Where my work friends became (and still are) my good friends. Where I woke up in the morning happy and excited to hang out with them and do amazing work together. A place where it wasn't work anymore, it was more like a family.

This experience was astonishing, it completely changed the way I perceived the concept of ‘work-life balance’ — there is no balance, there is no separation. But more profoundly there is a world where they can become one-and-the-same.

A place where work can happen alongside the beauties of life. Where you can work from a beach in Bali if you wanted — perhaps you’re even there with your team because you’re all that close of friends! A place where you can work at your own pace whilst grieving, or supported to take as much time off as needed.

No one, especially not in this day and age, should have to wake up unhappy and dreading going to work. Nor should anyone have to worry about adjusting their work hours so they can be there for the first day of school.

You should never feel bad or responsible for the repercussions of taking a day off sick or to shift working hours so you can drop your son off on their first day of school. If your boss or company ever tells you that they “need” you and you can’t take a day off or can’t adjust your hours to see your daughter's first baseball match, then that’s a failure of leadership — a failure of the company to YOU, not the other way around.

I believe when organizations become more like families and less of a totalitarianism they begin to foster trust and loyalty (which is not to be confused with obedience). Families support each other through the ups and downs, and organizations that foster this will build something much more powerful than productivity, they’ll foster passion.

“Working hard for something we don’t care about is called stress; working hard for something we love is called passion.” — Simon Sinek

Look to create a place where it’s no longer work, it’s just life. Build an environment where everyone can be their fullest self. A place where people are valued for who they are, flaws and all.

We just have ‘life’ and we get to choose how we spend it. Life’s too short to have anything less.