Work-life Balance: An 8 to 5 Inconvenient Truth

Work-life balance is the much-debated and strongly-recommended idea that has been around since long, particularly in Software employment. Though the idea was primarily coined only for women, it later expanded to the male workforce too. Despite all the name and fame, the so-called work-life balance gained, work-life balance is still a strange aspiration for a fulfilling life. For many, balance means stasis.

They imply work is bad and life is good; we lose ourselves in work but find in life; we just survive work but live life. Thus, the challenge, we are rather told, is to balance the weight of work with the subtlety of life. This makes work-life balance an inconvenient truth

An Outdated Model?

What makes work-life balance an outdated model is a fact it traditionally takes work and life as separate worlds. At its most wrong-headed, the work-life balance was taken as a literal prescription to employees to spend the same number of hours at recreational activities as at work.

In our modern world, work is not the opposite of life. Rather, it's a part of it – just like family is, like are friends, hobbies, and community.

All these areas of living have their share of wonderful moments that uplift us and the moments that drag us down. The same applies to work, yet we think of work as an inherent bad in need of a counterweight and we lose understanding of the possibility for better.

Work-life Blend – The New Norm

I feel work-life balance does exist, but surely not in the exact way that it’s perceived. Chasing the traditional work-life balance approach, we treat work and life as different entities, which is unrealistic, demanding, and a redundant burden to put ourselves through. It means balance is not the right word to use and we need something more fluid that covers the way we work, live our lives, and all the things that happen in between. Let’s call it a “work-life blend”.

Leveraging the Work-Life Blend Practices

Understand the “blend”

The first thing is the understanding and acknowledgment of the blend. We must admit that work-life blend makes our lives that we don't need to make "perfect", and feel like a failure if we cannot. Many people claiming to have a perfected balance are just drastically deprioritized, focusing on just fewer things. According to Joshua Zerkel, Evernote’s former head of community, and a certified productivity expert, the key lies in prioritising within your blended lifestyle.

Prioritizations

People want to fit all of it in, without setting priorities. Achieving a work-life blend is not tied to doing everything at the same time, all the time. It is rather about determining a way to work on the most important pieces that make sense to you. Know the major elements that you want to get into your days; fitness, meals with friends, a movie with a family, self-care, etc., and schedule them a regular interval.

Know Your Thresholds

Once you know your priorities, it's time to make them happen. It is important to have a clear idea on where you want to spend your time and it should not feel like an overwhelming mess. However, keep in mind that your time boxes and boundaries would break sometimes and that should be okay. Accepting this imperfection and that things might overlap is the key to achieve your priorities. Using simple tactics like using a different laptop to get personal tasks done to avoid losing yourself checking slack in between, can help you minimize this overlap.

Take it as a Process & Not a Matter of Days

It is important to be patient while adopting and striving to achieve a work-life blend approach. Many times we intend to stick to our to-do-list, but it doesn’t work that way. Here, your patience and gradual adaption to this new approach count. You are going to take time in tweaking and adjusting, little by little, weeks by weeks. And eventually, it would work out.

The Final Thoughts

The modern concept of the work-life blend is not a myth like a work-life balance because it is possible to achieve this blend; however, it’s up to us to make it happen. The most important categories are not “work” and “life.” One should not struggle to balance the two. It, therefore, seems more valuable to not try to balance the “unbalanceable”, but to treat work the same way you do life. At the end of the day, it all comes down to one’s approach towards work. When you can take pleasure in your jobs, you wouldn’t even feel the need to maintain any sort of balance, as your lives would already be in a “blend” or “harmony”.