The pursuit of a work-life balance has become something of a modern obsession. Everyone seems to have a view on how best to achieve it.
We have all heard the advice: ‘leave work at work’, ‘don’t become a workaholic’, ‘find time to exercise’ and ‘make sure you are living your life as well’. It is as though balance is simply a matter of better discipline.
Year after year, countless people chase the much-lauded but exceptionally elusive concept of work-life balance and many come up short.
The reason is simple. Work-life balance, as a concept, is broken.
The problem starts with the phrase itself, suggesting that work is separate from life. However, work is a huge component of most people’s lives and often becomes a significant part of who they are.
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It is not as though people walk through the door, sit at a desk, open a laptop or start a shift, and suddenly shut off the rest of their lives. Whether people like it or not, work follows many of us home; technology now allows workers to be accessible every hour of the day, seven days a week.
Then there is the flawed assumption that a perfect ratio can be achieved between time spent on work and everything else, but life is not a mathematical equation.
The point is that work rarely stays neatly behind the workplace door.
Happiness does not come from dividing each day into eight hours for work, life, and sleep. Some days are taken up by meetings, deadlines, projects, customer demands, and difficult decisions. While, others allow more room for family, friends, health, hobbies, rest, and the parts of life that are not measured by productivity.
Quite often, work flows into personal space and personal life flows into work.
Another problem with the phrase work-life balance is the suggestion that the less we work, the happier we will become.
In fact, many people gain an enormous amount of satisfaction from their work. It can provide purpose, identity, achievement and a sense of contribution.
The problem is not work itself; it is when work becomes all-consuming, endlessly urgent, and every request is treated as though it cannot wait. That is why the real challenge is not to work less at all costs but to stop treating every day as though it must be perfectly balanced.
A longer-term view is needed.
There will be moments when people need to be more present and available at work, while at other times, they need to engage more with family, friends and other aspects of life. Sometimes they are pulled in one direction, and sometimes in another.
Some experts describe this as the seasons of life. Balance, they suggest, is not something achieved every day, but something that plays out over months, years and even decades.
There may be seasons when the focus is on working hard, building a career, establishing financial security, or taking on new responsibilities. Those seasons may be followed by periods when work takes a back seat, perhaps because of parenting, caring responsibilities, health, study, travel or personal change.
The pursuit of perfect work-life balance can create stress, anxiety and guilt. We might do ourselves a favor by embracing work-life imbalance instead.
That does not mean surrendering to burnout, accepting unreasonable workloads, or treating exhaustion as a badge of honor. It means recognizing that life will not always be evenly divided, no matter how carefully the diary is managed.
Perhaps the better aim is not work-life balance but work-life flow. That means seeing work and personal life as connected rather than competing forces, allowing more space for personal life when the situation warrants it and leaning more heavily into work when that is genuinely needed.
When people are flexible enough to go with the flow, their lives may finally feel closer to balance.