Stop looking for Work/Life Balance and embrace Work/Life Integration.
There is a dilemma for most ambitious people these days because they are told they should not be working so many long hours and instead be focused on their mental and physical health.
The dilemma is to become successful at what you do; you need to put in the hours. Whether you want to be a successful tennis player or a business leader, there is no substitute for putting in the hours to develop your skills. No one will win Wimbledon if they have not put in the long hours of practice. And you won’t become a leader of a large organisation without spending hours consuming books, doing the work and developing your skills.
In the history of human development, the people willing to make sacrifices to achieve the things they want to achieve are the ones who are most likely to achieve the goals they set out to achieve.
To these successful people, the idea of a work/life balance is an anathema. Only allowing themselves to do the work they love for eight hours a day and then forcing themselves to rest for eight hours before getting eight hours of sleep does far more damage to their mental health than having the freedom to spend sixteen hours developing and testing out their ideas.
The work/life balance worked well when most people worked in factories. Our jobs didn’t involve a lot of mental effort. We did the same thing day in, day out. We went into work, did our eight-hour shift and then went home and watched TV or played games with our family before going to bed.
The nature of our work did not involve solving problems, so leaving work at work was easy.
But then we moved into the Information Age, where our jobs became making sense of the information coming across our desks. Now, it became very difficult to stop thinking when our workday ended.
I remember the days coming home on the bus with my mind engrossed in the latest dilemma one of my clients was facing and trying to think of a suitable legal solution to the problem. My workday never ended when I walked through the office door at the “end” of the workday.
If you insist on setting boundaries between your work and personal life, you will cause yourself a lot of unnecessary stress. First, you will be fighting a losing battle. The way we work today is shifting, more flexibility may feel like more control over your time, but that flexibility does not change the volume of work you are expected to do. You still have to do the work sometime.
More flexibility means you now have more choice about when you do your work. More choice is not necessarily better. Often more options cause more stress. If you decide to start your workday a little later on a Monday morning, you will, logically, finish later in the day. If you choose to stop working early on Wednesday and take the afternoon off to enjoy the beautiful spring weather, you will need to make up that time on Saturday (the traditional working way in my home town — early closing Wednesday and open on a Saturday morning)
However, if we move away from the concept of work/life balance, we open ourselves up to the idea of work/life integration.
What is work/life integration?
This is where you put no boundaries between your work and personal life. You respond to your tasks as a whole instead of two separate things. For instance, if you want to go to the gym at 2 PM on a Tuesday, no problem. Likewise, if you feel like working on a presentation late into the evening, then again, no problem.
I remember hearing a story about Michael Dell in the early 2000s. He would start his day in the office around 8:30 AM and work until 5:30 PM. He would then go home and have dinner with his family and play with his kids. Then, when his kids went to bed, he would go into his home office and spend an hour or two dealing with emails.
Gary Vaynerchuk does something similar. He goes home around 6 PM to spend some quality family time before getting back to doing some work later in the evening when his kids are in bed.
The great thing about work/life integration is there is no guilt. It might feel uncomfortable doing a personal chore at 11 AM when you would typically be doing work, but once you become comfortable doing work when you know you will be in a better frame of mind, you will soon stop feeling uncomfortable.
Another benefit of work/life integration is that if you feel a little sluggish in the afternoons, you could always make afternoons when you do your exercise or chores.
Work/life integration has enabled me to build a business. I live in the Far East — seventeen hours ahead of California and nine hours ahead of Europe. Most of my clients are in these time zones. This means my afternoons are quiet. All my clients are sleeping. It just makes sense for me to do my exercise and chores in the afternoon.
Work/life integration allows you to work when you want to work and removes the stress of structuring your day in a balanced way.
I do a lot of coaching calls on a weekend, so I take Wednesdays off. From time to time, I need to use Wednesday for a project I am working on. I never get stressed about it. If I work Wednesday, I will arrange a family afternoon some other time in the week.
If I feel tired, I never feel guilty having a nap or going for a walk. The freedom I have over how I manage my time is refreshing.
If you want to gain mastery over your time:
Stop trying to squeeze your work into pre-defined boxes.
Become more flexible.
Look at your work and personal lives as a whole rather than two separate things.
You will feel an overwhelming sense of relief not to have to squeeze finishing a report into a couple of hours when you feel exhausted at the end of the day. You can stop, go for a walk, have some dinner with your family or friends and return to the report later in the evening when everything is much quieter and you are feeling less tired.
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