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I’m Over Seeking Work/Life Balance

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I’m over seeking work/life balance.

Is that ok to tell you? Too late, I guess. Here’s the deal. When I was in college (in my late 20s), I had a professor who taught about work/life balance as this thing where you seek to balance the scales of your life.

The problem is that the rest of the school was teaching that there are certain things that should take up your time. You need to study. There are service projects (yeah, my college required that we serve people and not like the Twilight Zone). There was work. Oh yeah, I had a wife and two sons, too.

They said you could balance it all, but make sure you get it all done and by the way, shouldn’t you be able to get all A’s?

Junk. All of it was junk.

Here’s the truth about work/life balance. It’s impossible in the short term.

You cannot have work/life balance in a day. The scales won’t balance.

There are weeks when work/life balance is a joke. I know because some of us spend five full days (or more) on the road with the life back at the house watching Stargate and eating the ice cream you left in the freezer.

Some years, there’s no such thing as work/life balance, like that year when the thing happened that changed everything in your life. Yeah. That’s the year.

Here’s the key to it all. Be where you are when you’re there and recognize that you don’t become someone else when you go to work, go back to your family, or go to the store.

You’re one person and that one person brings work home and home to work, especially if you’re like me and work in a room that used to be a bedroom near my bedroom.

Here are the tips.

  1. When you’re working, work. Accept that you have people and life at home and be honest about it.
  2. When you’re home, be home. Accept that you didn’t get it all done at work and have another chance tomorrow.
  3. Give up the idea of multitasking. You’re nowhere near as good at it as you think. Didn’t you forget something while you were reading this?

The best we can do is to be a whole person who has multiple parts that can coexist as long as we are diligent with the one piece that needs attention right now.