I hate the term work-life balance. The Cambridge Dictionary defines work-life balance as:
“The amount of time you spend doing your job compared with the amount of time you spend with your family doing things you enjoy.”
The term evokes the mental image of a set of scales. On the one hand is life, which is good and must be maximized, and on the other hand is work, which must be minimized at all costs. It is a stupid premise and a dangerous concept.
This is why it’s crap
Imagine every moment of your life, from birth to death, as a pie chart. Inclusive of your childhood and your golden years in the long retirement that I hope you enjoy.
The biggest slice of that pie chart = work.
If you work from early adulthood until retirement, you will spend about one-third of your life working. That is the single largest chunk of the pie chart that is your life.
The idea that we must endeavor to minimize that massive chunk of our lives places our focus in the wrong area.
This is what to do instead
Do not focus on minimizing the time you spend on your work. Instead, find something you love professionally and do it wholeheartedly.
It is the rational thing to do.
Even if you can cut thousands of working hours from your life, work will still be the most significant part of your life, but only by a smaller margin. Wouldn’t you prefer to love your work for 90,000 hours instead of tolerating it for 80,000 hours?
I understand that can put you in an uncomfortable situation. You may be facing a difficult choice, perhaps feeling like you cannot step away from what you do today and toward a new thing tomorrow for one of many valid-seeming reasons.
The paycheck, prestige, or social pressure from friends and families shackles you to a loveless grind. These things cannot be entirely ignored, but they aren’t the biggest thing.
This is what is important
The biggest thing is how you show up for your whole life. Not just the family bits and not just the work bits.
None of us has the mental and emotional discipline to prevent dissatisfaction and stress in one part of our lives from affecting the other parts, especially work, where we spend the most time.
The Zen Buddhist quote, “How you do anything is how you do everything,” also applies to work-life balance. But it isn’t just about execution; it is also about emotion.
If you do your work with joy, gratitude, engagement, and love, you’ll find that high vibe in your personal life. If you do your work feeling stuck, discontent, detached, and indifferent, you’re going to find that crappy vibe showing up uninvited for the rest of your life too.
This is what to do
This is the time of year when many of us are reflective. We are less carried away by the momentum of our lives and more likely to ask ourselves the big questions. To consider different possibilities.
When you reflect on the last year of your life, if you do not feel great love in what you do and cannot see a way to change that, then you need to change what you do.
When the biggest part of your life is one of the best parts of your life, you find something better than balance. Balance is difficult. It requires perpetual effort. You work to achieve it, then expend more effort to keep it. You are always fighting things’ propensity to fall out of balance.
Instead of balance, seek harmony
Harmony is fluid; it doesn’t need one thing to always stay in a certain place. It may rise or fall with the music of our lives. Harmony unites the parts of your life into a cohesive whole rather than putting two important parts of your life in competition.
Find something you love to do, and in so doing, you’ll find harmony. With harmony, you’ll find joy, fluidity, and comfort that transforms your life.
Even when that life is busy as hell.
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This article was originally published on Medium in the publication Career Paths.