UPLIFT: May 14, 2022
Professional Conundrum
Question: What does work life balance mean, and how to achieve it?
There is a lot written about work life balance, yet it remains an elusive concept. Over the last two years, the pandemic drove organizations to offer greater flexibility but blurred the boundaries of personal and professional life.
Work life balance is really about ensuring how we can thrive in our professional journey, while not having to compromise in any way on our personal pursuits and responsibilities. That said, work life balance means different things to different people, and even for the same person it may mean different things at different stages of their life.
For instance, for someone it could mean being able to work for 9 AM-5 PM 5 days a week and for the remaining time on weekdays and all of the weekends they can devote themselves to their personal pursuits and responsibilities. For another person, it may mean being held accountable for delivering a certain output while not being constrained or bound by time they spend in or out of the office. For a third person, it may well mean working for 7 days a week, but with limited hours every day as they pursue their professional journey.
While there is no silver bullet to achieving work life balance, here are some aspects that can help in moving the needle.
1. Conscious Career Choice
Some careers are more demanding that others, and making a conscious choice is key to achieve the desired work life balance. For instance, consulting or Investment Banking offer great monetary benefits but have a trade-off in terms of long working hours. As you reassess your responsibilities and desires on the personal front, there is merit is re-evaluating career choices that enable you to achieve it.
2. Define What You Seek:
What we seek varies at different stages of our life, but we seldom take the time for articulating it for ourselves. Every 6-12 months reassessing your personal priorities and seeing it marries with your current professional responsibilities is important. This helps in two ways –
A. It enables us to consciously assess if what we seek is feasible given our professional responsibilities
B. If there is lack of alignment that reflection on 2A highlights, then it pushes us to either reset out expectations or alter our career path.
While career choices cannot be reset every six months, a conscious reflection can help us understand if we are over indexed on our professional side, ignoring the personal side or vice a versa.
3. Reflect on Your Support System
The strength of our social support system has a huge influence on our ability to achieve work life balance. If we try and do everything ourselves, we reduce the odds of being able achieve or sustain the balance in our lives.
Viewing your daily/ weekly schedules to find and curate pockets of support (even if reciprocal) that you can create at the workplace and social circles is critical to achieving this balance. An example would be swapping a project that requires late evening with a colleague for 2 weeks in a month to enable you to get home early, or partnering with a neighbor to drop/ pick your child for skating class 3 days a week while you reciprocate it for the other two days for their child.
4. Balance is a Point in Time Activity
When we ride a bicycle, we are balanced at a point of time. If we lose focus by trying to go too slow or too fast, we may well lose balance the next moment. Much like that work life balance needs to be achieved moment by moment, and we cannot be equally balanced in all moments. There could be a pothole (read a difficult assignment or opportunity or illness in the family) that may need us to pedal harder, or a slope (read tailwinds) that may enable us to go easier during the ride. To ensure we can move forward without getting exhausted it’s critical to match our effort and focus in response to the terrain we are going through.
In this sense, a concept that started to resonate more with me is work life integration rather than work life balance. Work life integration is more about not trying to lead a milestone driven life where the personal life starts once we have achieved a milestone (be it a promotion or investment as a founder) but rather curate and live our lives fully as we traverse the pursuit of professional milestones. To me, this manifests in baking in that swimming session or play time with your child during the week or even early evening rather than parking it aside for the weekend. Hybrid working has made it easier to strive for this integration than the traditional 5 days a week office ever allowed.
PERSPECTIVES
“When all is said and done, there are four things that really matter in life.
1. Mental Health
2. Physical Health
3. Relationship with Your Close Circle, typically >7 people
4. Financial freedom or independence
5. A Sense of Purpose
Yet, we end up spending 20% of our time that on things that have 80% value in our lives, and 80% time pursuing the remaining 20% things.”
Point to Ponder
If there was one thing you would want to include in your weekly schedule that would make your feel a great sense of work life balance, what would that be? How can you curate this activity into your schedule?
