Struggling With Work-Life Balance? Try Career “Interval Training”

There’s no shortage of advice out there on the theme work-life balance. Most comes down to common sense: If you work all the time, you’re going to burn out. You need to balance time in the office with time spent with family and friends and on hobbies. 

Great. I can’t argue with that. But it’s also easier said than done. Anyone who’s started their own business or been in a high-pressure role knows that — despite our best intentions — the workday doesn’t always end at 5 (or 7 or 11 ...). Same goes for a new parent (a role I’m getting familiar with). Try telling a newborn at 3 a.m. to stop crying because you have to be in the office in a few hours and need to “balance” your family life with your work life. Good luck! 

The more I think about work-life balance, the more I feel it can pose an unreasonable, maybe even unachievable, bar for many people. The truth is that there are lots of times in life when balance goes out the window. It’s not ideal. But it often can’t be helped. And — this is the tricky part — some times that loss of balance is critical to success. I don’t know Elon Musk personally, but balance doesn’t seem to be his forte. Yet, he’s created the world’s most dominant electric car company, while also pioneering private space exploration, among other ventures. 

I’d argue that for some people there’s actually a more helpful way to conceptualize the work-life connection. And it comes from the world of sports. Interval training isn’t a new idea. For more than 100 years, elite runners have improved endurance by alternating periods of intense activity with periods of rest or lower-intensity exercise. More recently, high-intensity interval training (or HIIT) has taken the gym world by storm. (If a CrossFit, Orangetheory or Shred415 has popped up in your neighborhood lately, you know exactly what I mean.) HIIT takes the interval concept to the extreme — with one-to-five minute bursts of heart-pounding, lung-busting exertion, followed by comparable periods of rest. 

An interval training approach to work   

You probably see where I’m going here. Starting or running a business, for instance, is a lot like HIIT.  Some periods are an all out sprint. Maybe you’re racing to find investors before funding runs out. Or you’re trying to beat competitors to market with a new product. Or you’re putting out a customer service fire before it explodes into something worse. At times like these, you’ve got no choice but to drop everything and let balance fall by the wayside. You miss those family dinners. You skip the trips to the gym. The job consumes you.  

Personally, I experienced this when Hootsuite was just getting off the ground. I had seven people working on a zero-revenue product — a platform we had just developed to manage multiple social networks from one dashboard. We had hundreds of thousands of users, but we hadn’t yet started to monetize. Paychecks were coming out of my credit card, which was maxing out fast. Investor decks had to be put together for pitch meetings. Buggy code needed to be fixed. New staff needed to be hired. There were stretches where my life simply had to be put on hold, with the business consuming every ounce of my energy. And you know what: It was worth it.   

Nor is this unique to entrepreneurs. There are lots of roles that require the same kind of intense, all-consuming exertion, where high performance is expected and the deadline was yesterday. The reality is that, in most businesses, slow and steady does not win the race. 

And what I’m saying is that’s OK. Balance won’t always be an option. But — and here’s the key lesson from HIIT — those bursts of activity absolutely need to be offset by periods of rest and recovery. Just as you can’t do jump squats and burpees for an hour straight without passing out (or worse), neither should you be pulling weeks’ worth of all-nighters or going months without seeing your kids at dinner. As with interval training, intense, all-consuming stretches at work require real down time to recover. And this is the step that’s too often missed. We go right from those all-nighters back into our normal work schedule. What’s really needed is an extended period away from the job — be that in the form of a few weeks vacation or even a longer sabbatical.  

It took me literally decades to understand this. Back in those early days, I wasn’t eating right or working out. I raced from one project to the next until my body literally gave out. An old sports injury flared up in the form of a herniated disc and left me unable to sit at a desk for more than a few minutes at a time. I was reduced to working on my back. Recently, however, I was able to take a month of paternity leave after the birth of my daughter. Granted, this wasn’t exactly a vacation. But distancing myself from work — completely — gave the “work” part of my mind and body the chance they needed to recover. I came back with energy and focus I hadn’t had in years.  

Destigmatizing rest 

I know there’s the temptation to see this time off as a luxury or indulgence. But just look at pro sports. The world’s most elite athletes have learned to prioritize rest, elevating it to an almost sacred level. Lebron James has said he sleeps an average of 12 hours a day. Usain Bolt and Venus Williams get an average of 10 hours of sleep. According to ESPN, most NBA players take naps on game day lasting up to three hours! These individuals are called upon to perform at the very highest levels — but they’re able to do so because they honor their downtime. And, of course, they also have the benefit of an off-season — something most corporate athletes couldn’t even dream of.  

Not to take the metaphor too far, but I think there’s one other business lesson to be gleaned from high-intensity interval training. The real benefit of HIIT is that it improves your overall health and performance, including during those times when you’re not exercising. Intense activity improves your VO2 max, the maximum amount of oxygen your body can use. The better your heart pumps blood, the easier it is to shoot hoops or play with your kids and the less likely you are to suffer heart disease. Plus, the “jolt” of a high-intensity work out leads to a documented afterburn effect — even when you’re not exercising, you’re burning more calories.  

Same goes for those intense periods at work. If you manage your corporate conditioning right, you end up developing a kind of resiliency. Projects that were overwhelming before become more and more manageable. Your coping and organizational muscles grow stronger. You’re able to work more efficiently and with greater focus, even when the pressure isn’t necessarily on. But, to be crystal clear, this only happens if you give yourself time to recover in between these intense periods of exertion. After all, no one out there can sprint a marathon.  

For companies, this interval-training approach has implications, too. Vacations need to be respected. Employees shouldn’t feel obligated to check email or respond to work requests when they’re meant to be resting and recovering. Likewise, managers need to check in and ensure people are using the vacation days they have rather than feeling they have to “take one” for the team. The concept of unlimited vacation, for all its challenges, takes this one step further. Given the relentless pace of digital innovation, work life today in many ways resembles a sprint. Employees need to be empowered to manage their own corporate training regimens — to go all out when needed and, just as importantly, to take the time to disconnect and recover.

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