Finding work-life balance: is it a corporate myth or a worthy aim?
There is nothing new about trying to establish an equilibrium between work and life. In the 1970s, when the world first sat up and discussed the tug of war between a professional career and personal life, it was referred to as corporate bigamy: a life where you were married to both your partner and your job.
Nowadays the concept is generally known as work-life balance. Yet, although we’ve been talking about the issue for decades, we don’t seem to be any closer to balancing these two integral elements. Is it possible that we’ve followed a fundamentally flawed approach all along?
In his 2010 presentation at the TED ideas forum Nigel Marsh, best-selling author of
Fat, Forty and Fired, notably stressed the importance of maintaining your own ideal work-life balance.
“If you don’t design your life, someone else will design it for you, and you may just not like their idea of balance,” he explained during his talk. “Commercial companies are inherently designed to get as much out of you as they can get away with. It’s in their nature. It’s in their DNA. It’s what they do. Even the good, well-intentioned companies.”
This sentiment of being at the helm of your career is shared by Mark Cameron, Chief Operating Officer of Astbury Marsden. Cameron said it is our responsibility, not that of our employer, to build the lives we want to lead depending on what is important to us.
According to Marsh, your perfectly balanced working day might consist of waking up at 8am, having a leisurely breakfast with the family while poring over that day’s
Financial Times before dropping the kids at school on the way to the office. After a morning of answering a few critical emails and delegating some key tasks you head to the gym for a challenging game of squash followed by a relaxed smoothie. In the afternoon, you knuckle down in the office before leaving promptly at 5pm for a cosy dinner at home or meeting up with friends.
Sounds fantastic. The question is: How often do you have days like that?
“The reality is, aiming for that type of balance is unattainable,” says Cameron. “It simply doesn’t exist. That’s not to say you can’t do all the things you are passionate about, you just need to be more realistic about the time frame within which you expect to do them. There is no reason why you can’t do everything you want to do just because you can’t do it all today.”
According to Cameron, if you regularly work an 80-hour week but love every minute of it, then that shouldn’t be seen as a situation you need to change. “Work is part of life, the two aren’t separate entities on opposing sides of a scale,” he explains. “If you are passionate about your job, then you won’t make a distinction between work and life, because all of it is life. Live it to the fullest.”
Source: Nigel Marsh, 2010 presentation at the TED ideas forum