If you’re like me, you’re probably trying to do all the things. But we’re not just trying to do all the things; we’re also trying to balance all the things.
And we’re not always succeeding. A recent study found that only one-third of full-time employees in the U.S. strongly believed that they had work-life balance. That means that two-thirds of us don’t.
And when we start to wonder whether we’re in the one-third or the two-thirds, it only takes a minute of scrolling on Instagram or Facebook to convince us that we’re not getting as much out of our careers or our family or our life as everyone else seems to be.
Trying to do it all—and balance it all—has left people simultaneously feeling burned out from trying too hard and feeling guilty about not trying hard enough.
How can we be better at balancing our work and life?
Stop aiming for work-life balance
The first step, ironically, is to stop aiming for work-life “balance.”
The problem with the idea of work-life balance is that it makes work and life a zero-sum game—as if work and life are opposite forces competing for your time and energy. This turns our choices into tradeoffs and we start to think about our time more in terms of what we’re not doing than in terms of what we are. Time spent at work means time not spent with your kids. Time spent picking your kids up from school means time not spent working for a promotion.
A competition has a winner and a loser. So, if work wins, then life loses. If life wins, then work loses. Aiming for work-life “balance” is like aiming for a tie. And while a tie is certainly better than a loss, is this really what we want to be striving for?
Balance is also precarious. It’s easily disturbed. As Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall, the authors of Nine Lies About Work. A Freethinking Leader’s Guide to the Real World, point out, “If you think about it, work-life balance is a strange aspiration for a fulfilling life. Balance is about stasis: if our lives were ever in balance—parents happy, kids taken care of, work working—then our overriding thought would be to shout ‘Nobody move!’ and pray all would stay perfect forever.”
Aim for work-life harmony
Instead of aiming for work-life “balance,” we can aim for something more positive: work-life harmony.
Harmony is about collaboration rather than competition.
Work-life harmony is less like trying to balance a dozen plates, hoping not to drop any, and more like orchestrating a symphony. When the notes fit together and each musician plays their own notes well, it makes for a beautiful, harmonious music. The different notes aren’t competing; they’re complementing each other, making the whole song better.
Rather than just aiming to minimize conflicts and trade-offs between our competing “work” and “life,” work-life harmony aims to integrate our life. It aims to bring our values, goals, and responsibilities together in a way that makes a whole beautiful symphony.
How can we achieve this kind of work-life harmony?
Instead of asking how we can balance our work and our lives, we can start by asking ourselves What kind of life do we want to live? We can become more intentional about how we weave together our work, our friends, our family, our passions, and everything else into the picture of what we want for our life as a whole. Rather than seeing the parts as opposing each other, we can think about how they all work together to make us who we are and who we want to be.
The good news is that once we are intentional about how we want to structure our lives, we will be better prepared to address work-life conflicts when they do arise. Knowing what we want our life narrative to look like gives us a framework that can help us structure our day-to-day operations.
We will know what to say ‘yes’ to and what to say ‘no’ to in a way that will be consistent with how we want to live our lives as a whole. A structure can help us answer the day-to-day questions of how much time to spend on work after dinner or whether we should skip a meeting to go see our kid’s dance recital.
Aim for a love-loathe imbalance
Work-life harmony is not about trying to have it all at the same time; it’s about having congruence between the things we do have. It’s about feeling like what we’re doing—whether it’s “work” or “life”—fits us and fits with how we want our life to go.
Thinking more broadly in terms of what kind of life we want gives us a kind of perspective that our day-to-day task scheduling can’t. It can free us from feeling guilty about not doing everything perfectly. It can help us let go of things that are unimportant or life-draining and hold onto the things that are life-giving.
As Buckingham and Goodall put it, we need to figure out what we love and what we loathe. And then, rather than aiming for a “work-life balance,” we aim for a “love-loathe imbalance.” By finding more in life to love and less to loathe, we can create a life that nourishes us and that allows us to be our best selves at work, at home, and in our communities.
To create this love/loathe imbalance, Buckingham and Goodall recommend actually tracking our loves and loathes:
take a pad around with you for the entire week. Down the middle of this pad, draw a vertical line to make two columns, and write “Loved It” at the top of one column and “Loathed It” at the top of the other. During the week, any time you find yourself feeling one of the signs of love scribble down exactly what you were doing in the Loved It column. And any time you find yourself feeling the inverse — before you do something, you procrastinate; while you do it, time drags; and when you’re done with it, you hope you never have to do it again — scribble down exactly what you were doing in the Loathed It column.
When we can center our lives around the things we love—wherever they are—we can be more than just balanced; we can actually thrive.
This is Post #3 in our Getting Unstuck Series. Check out the rest of the series here:
- Getting Unstuck: How to Prioritize Your Life
- Getting Unstuck: How to Follow Through on Your Priorities
- Getting Unstuck: How to Change When Change Is Hard
- Getting Unstuck: How to Change Your Life in 5 Seconds
Also published on Medium.
You bring up so many great points, I loved this article. It is a constant struggle.
I absolutely love your perspective on this. I can see why ‘work-life’ balance would be harder to achieve and why work-life harmony makes so much more sense. I feel like this is more achievable. Thanks for the inspiration on this. Big help!
This is such a struggle for working women with children. It is hard not to see them in competition with each other. I always found it difficult to manage both well. You are right, you can’t do either perfectly. Even when I was home full time I found I wasn’t doing it perfectly. We think we have to be perfect to be ok. We do the best we can and pray God makes up the rest.