What exactly is work-life balance? (and four ways to fail)

I would suggest there are two parts to understanding work-life balance:

• Balance: You get about the same amount of good stuff from both home and work

• Happiness: And the good stuff you get from home is greater than the bad stuff you get from work

A good balance would look something like this:

It’s not perfect – there is some time at home spent on things we don’t want to be doing but which we have to do, and work isn’t all fun, but at least the two home/work sizes are roughly in balance, home is mostly good, and work is mostly good.  And the good bit of home is greater than the bad bit of work, so work isn’t looking over our personal life.  Result!

There are four ways to fail

1 – Too much time at work – even if home is fine and work is good, this is unbalanced:

2 – Too little enjoyment/achievement of work – even if home is fine.  Work is important and shouldn’t be neglected. 

3 – Bad bit at work is bigger than your home happiness – even if home is fine.  This will result in work looming over your personal life, ruining it. 

4 – Home isn’t fine.  Whatever is going on at work, and however much time is being spent at work, home needs to be mostly good. 

It’s all too easy to slip into some form of imbalance, some combination of the above – for example long hours of a not very pleasant job, and a chunk of home time being wasted too:

The good bits are roughly equal (though a bit small) – but the problem is that once the bad bit of work is significantly bigger than the good bit of home then you KNOW your work-life balance is not good enough.  Something must be done!

The dream would be to have this:

More time at home and less at work, and home has nearly all good stuff, and work has almost no bad stuff. That would be great!

In reality I think the best you could achieve, realistically - and it would still be FINE - is probably this:

Home is still a bit smaller than work, but is mostly good, and work doesn’t have TOO much bad stuff in it, so you have more good stuff than bad in your life.

And the good stuff is well balanced between home and work.

This is what we can realistically aim for.

Let’s compare the typical bad with the realistic good, and spot the difference:

You can see that by enlarging the time spent at home (with a slightly better ratio there), and getting work to be 2/3 good rather than 2/3 bad, we can get the good bit at home to be larger than the bad bit at work.  This is the challenge for most of us.

The actual numbers of hours

Do the real numbers match up with this idea? – yes they do, and here is an example:

If you work five days, not counting commuting (which is part of your work really) you are probably doing a 45 week, minimum.

Your home life is 5 evenings of 5 hours and two weekend days of 15 hours, which is 55 hours.  45 and 55: You are spending slightly more time at home, which is good.

But if you let things slip, and work 12 hour days (including commuting, this is easy to slip into) that’s 60 hours a week rather than 45.

This will mean that your evenings become perhaps only 2 hours, which is 10 hours a week instead of 25, so even with a full weekend you are only spending 40 hours awake outside of work.  60 at work and 40 outside it.

And as soon as you go into work, or work from home, at the weekend then 60-40 has become 70-30.  Work is now more than double your home time.

But also we should consider QUALITY time at home – half of it is probably chores, vegging out in front of the TV or email, etc, and this lost time doesn’t reduce when we have less time at home, it’s the exercise and conversation, thinking and creating, the quality time, that is lost - so the shift from 45-55 to 60-40 and 70-30 is really, if you lose 20 hours of personal time, 45-35 shifting to 60-20 and 70-10.

The ratio isn’t great to begin with, but as you increase your hours at work the ratio gets way out of whack very quickly.  From 45-35 to 70-10 !!

So as well as total time at home and at work, we need to know how much of the time is quality time at home, and similarly how much of the time at work is enjoyable or not.

A closer look at time imbalance between home and work:

Here’s one way the balance can be wrong: 

This person does not have a happy home life, but they LOVE their work, so they are spending almost all their time at work.  And even if their home life is OK, (next diagram) their love of their work means that WORK is where they get most of their happiness from.

So there is plenty of good stuff, but, whether or not the home side of things is good, the balance of where the happiness comes from is off.

Is this OK?  To get nearly all our happiness from work?

I think not, because the work-based happiness is probably not sustainable.   What if they are made redundant, or the market crashes, or the company is taken over – or when they retire – and the work-a-holic realises that they have no friends and not much of a family life to fall back on.  And friends and family are more than just a fall back – think about your eulogy, will they even MENTION your work? Probably not. 

So yes, enjoy your job, but the good stuff needs to come at least 50% from your home life.

Unbalanced the other way

That was all work and pretty much no home time.

But what about the reverse – nearly all home and minimal work time / effort?

If your work is contributing almost nothing to your happiness then that’s a loss too.  You are spending 5 days a week there because you need to earn money, so you might as well enjoy it or do something worthwhile.  And work IS a great opportunity to get a sense of achievement, in fact it’s probably the best place for that.

Here’s a person who has minimised their work because they don’t like it.  Instead of fixing it, perhaps by leaving or changing career, they have just minimised it.  So their work good-stuff is miniscule.  This doesn’t seem to be a good enough answer, it’s also not a balanced work-life.

So, as described above, let’s aim for this: 

It’s definitely achievable, - and it would be FINE.

• The home good bit is bigger than the work bad bit,

• And the two good bits are roughly equal.

THAT’S a good work-life balance.