Why I believe the concept of work life balance is flawed

One discussion I had with a colleague at work recently is whether an optimal work life balance exists. We both agreed that an optimal work life balance doesn’t exist, even over a single day period. However, the conversation with my colleague has thrown a lot of questions in my mind over the concept of work life balance. Having done some reflection recently, I feel the concept of work life balance is flawed. In this blog post, I will talk more about some of my thoughts.

Note: This blog post only gives my opinion on the concept of work life balance, but everyone will have different views.

When you think about the concept of work life balance, most people consider it to be having a good balance between work and other aspects of life. Therefore, when you strive to have a good work life balance, you are essentially striving to have a good balance between work and other aspects of your life. However, the problem that I have with this is that you never will have balance in your life. This is because at different points of time, you will be prioritising different things. At one point of time, you may be prioritizing work to achieve a promotion or to finish a big project. At another point of time, a situation may arise which requires you to prioritise your family over other things. This means that there will always be things you are prioritising, and other things that you are deprioritising. Therefore, you will never feel that you have a balance between all different aspects of your life. This all implies that achieving a work life balance is unattainable, making the concept of work life balance flawed.

Furthermore, when you think about what makes up a good work life balance, things that come into mind is having a good job, time for family and friends, looking after your physical health and mental wellbeing, doing your hobbies, time for self-care and relaxation, going on holidays, as well as sleeping and eating well. There are probably things I am missing. Ultimately, there are a LOT of things that make up a good work life balance. The reality however is that due to time and energy constraints, you can’t have it all. Even if you are able to exercise regularly, do well in your job and make time for your friends and family, you are probably still making a sacrifice somewhere still. I have friends that have businesses, but in the process of building their business, they are spending less time on other important aspects of life simply because they don’t have the time and energy to do it all. If you try and balance everything in order to have a good work life balance, you will always be disappointed as you can’t have it all. This also implies that having a good work life balance is unattainable, making the concept of work life balance flawed.

In my opinion, the underlying theme of the previous two paragraphs is that the reality is always different from the expectation. ?When we aim to have a good work life balance, our expectations would be to:

·?????? Be switched off from work fully outside of work hours

·?????? Have enough time for rest and recovery

·?????? Spend a good amount of time with family and friends

It is all well and good having these expectations. However, the reality of life is that:

·?????? You will face unexpected curveballs, some of which will be very last minute or urgent.

·?????? You will have bad days.

·?????? To spend enough time in meeting your goals, you may need to work long hours and/or spend less time on other things.

Sometimes, navigating the realities of life means that your expectations of what you want in a good work life balance will not be met, or even go out of the window. I feel that the concept of work life balance doesn’t account for the realities of life, making it unrealistic to achieve in practice.

Instead of thinking about achieving a good work life balance, an alternative way of thinking about things is to think about all the aspects that your ideal work life balance would consist of. This can act as an initial starting point when reflecting on how things are going and what decisions need to be made going forward. If one aspect of your ideal work life balance is time for your hobbies and you are consistently doing not enough of that then that is where a decision needs to be made. Either, you become OK with the fact that time for hobbies may be one of the things that needs to be partially sacrificed to have more time for other things. Or you try and adjust your lifestyle to make more time for hobbies (which is likely to involve less time for something else). As mentioned in the third paragraph, you can’t have every single aspect of your ideal work life balance. However, you can think about what parts of your ideal work life balance you are doing less of, and judge if you are OK with that or not.

Another alternative way of going about things is to focus more on responding to the situations in front of you and adjust accordingly. What I mean by this is that it is important to know what you have coming up, and prioritise accordingly so that you can approach what you have in the most effective way. For example, if you have exams coping up, you will probably approach this by spending more time on revision, and less time for social plans and travelling. Another example is if you are planning to buy a house, then you not do things which cost a lot of money with the intention of saving money. With this approach, the focus is more on giving yourself the best chance of navigating situations in front of you, rather than striving to balance everything.