Blending, not Balance needed for a Life that Works…
[I think that it is time for us to let go of the myth of work-life balance and move on to something that has a better chance of working and, in the long run, can be more effective and satisfying.]
For years, I worked diligently to make sure that I was doing my best in “managing my time”: painstakingly carving and stacking my days with tasks that were “important, but not urgent” as well as the urgent ones that I had not cared for previously. As a planful P in the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), this fit into my wheelhouse nicely, as I over-planned most “normal” activities to allow for serendipity and spontaneity to appear like magic in the rest of my unscheduled time. Strangely, it was not satisfying in actual practice, as I found myself checking lots of boxes and GTD like crazy, but feeling like an overstuffed grocery bag splitting at the seams…
I don’t think that I am alone in this. Many people that I work with talk about work-life balance as if it is something that they’ve thought about, examined deeply and have bought into trying to create for themselves; we all strive mightily towards that elusive goal without reflection or consideration of what concerns matter most to us. Others of us run our lives as a combination of FOMO + YOLO: headless chickens running around checking out what we might be able to do elsewhere while not fully present to where we currently are; I am all seizing the day (“Carpe Diem”), but a life led like that leads to SNAFUs (which untended ultimately leads to a FUBAR that even our moms wouldn’t recognize; a discussion we can have over a beer sometime).
Let’s start off with deconstructing work-life balance. First implies the artificial separation of church and state, putting our professional career and ambition in one bucket and our personal lifestyle in another. Secondly, the word balance implies that we have two forces working against each other, that we have to prioritize one over the other. I think that another way to approaching this is by thinking of us “blending” the different concerns in our lives and allocating sufficient time and attention to each of those areas. Instead of asking if I want to write another report or care for my health, how do I design things so that I care for my health in order to get the work that I committed to completed in an effective way?
I don’t want to pretend like I have this handled; even making time for the writing of this post was challenging (having a tendency to commit to a lot and then triaging later isn’t easily dropped…). What I do want you to know is that there is different way of considering our time that can work when bought into and practiced. I have been working on this for about a year and a half and have just started to get into a flow that works more days than it doesn’t…
How do we begin to “blend” our time? How much do we even have? Each week of seven days has twenty-four hours, so we have 168 hours of focus for us to apportion during each cycle. I function best when I get eight hours of sleep, so that leaves me with 122 hours to work with; if you figure that you waste 12 hours per week waiting in line, in an elevator, etc., you are left with 100 hours. 100 hours is a convenient figure: 1 hour equals 1% of your waking time. You can ask yourself: is this next meeting or other activity the highest and best use of my precious life?
100 hours can seem like a lot of time or just the blink of an eye, but that is what you’re working with each week. How much time are you allocating to your lifetime strategic initiatives, how much to production of deliverables you’ve committed to, to any administrative overhead and to the necessary recharging cycles we all need? In future posts, I’ll dig into the philosophical underpinnings and basic mechanics that I use here. What I can say is that ten plus years of budgeting and planning my time this way has allowed me to say no to more requests that don’t make sense, create needed blocks of strategic time and be generally more productive day-to-day.
Ultimately, we all have the same 168 hours each week: some of us are prolific, others of us, not so much. What choices are you making? How do you decide? Ask yourself: is this the highest and best use of this next hour, this week, this precious life?
