Do you work to live, or live to work? Where, on the line between those two extremes do you prefer to reside? Does your bumper sticker say "The worst day fishin' is better than the best day workin'?" or "Greed is good —Gordon
Gecko?"
Most of us, of course, are somewhere in the middle. At some point in our lives, we may've been averse to work, at another, workaholics. As we mature, most of us tend to seek a balance between our own lives, our loved ones, our neighbors and earning a living. It's becoming pervasive enough that people formerly in charge of "telecommuting" programs, who then became "telework" managers, are now more often called "work/life program" managers.
The rigors of a 9-to-5 workday (or 7-to-7, for the more ambitious), added to a half-hour a day commute (the U.S. national average), leads to spending more time working than sleeping. The rest of the time gets parceled out to various family activities and—for a lucky few—some time to spend on one's self.
Different Strokes
Each of us has a unique perspective on work: Some are dedicated ladder-climbers, willing to put in long hours for the reward of a prestigious position in the future. Others see work as a means to an end and way to take home pay with which to live "the good life." Still more are so focused on family and parenting that work is a necessary evil that distracts from "job one."
Where do you fall in the spectrum?
Most people want less work and more leisure time. Shell Oil reported, in a 2002 study, that given the choice between an extra day's pay or an extra day off work, 58% would take the day off.
It's especially important when you work from home: While management may worry that people will spend less time working, the opposite seems to happen. There's nobody else leaving at 5:00 pm, so you might work longer hours. Setting limits on your work time is not only appropriate, it's healthy.
What Is "Balance?"
Some Native Americans I've met believe in a "medicine wheel," a way to represent the important issues in a life. The four directions relate to those basic issues: Emotional, Physical, Intellectual, and Spiritual. If you imagine the wheel balanced on a central point, like a top, a perfectly-balanced life would be represented by the wheel staying level. When someone makes you angry, the wheel tilts toward Emotions. When you fall down, it tilts toward the Physical. When you're spending the "right" amount of time (where "right" is unique to you), you're in balance.
But, this imagery begs a question: Balance over what time span? Seconds, hours, days, months, years? It's unlikely that you're staying in balance during a long, dry, windy meeting, while you just sit there: You're not physically stimulated, your emotions ebb and flow, and there's probably not a lot of spirituality. So, staying in balance over the period of just one hour would require some innovative behavior on your part.
Most successful people seem to balance their lives over periods ranging from a week to a month. They try to find time for themselves, for some exercise, some play time, some family time, every week or so; they may really treasure their weekends, and refuse to take work home so they can focus on the other parts of their lives.
Waiting for the annual vacation doesn't seem to work. People who do that seem to cram too much variety into a mere couple of weeks it looks like they're working at trying to have fun. We need more variety than that in our daily behavioral diet.
Maybe you need to draw lines around work in your calendar, and set clear start and end times. There'll be exceptions, of course, but with a clear set of rules that are just right for you, you can develop a balance that works for you and your health.
The Right Balance
There's no checklist adequate to tell you whether you're in balance or not. You have to find out by noticing your own experience. It usually shows up as frustration or pain somewhere in your life; that's the signal there's something you need to pay more attention to. Maybe your kids don't pay you much attention...for that matter neither does your spouse. Or, your neighbors never ring the doorbell just for some minor thing like borrowing a cup of flour. Or, you find yourself wondering one day, "who'd come to my funeral?" Or, your boss or client gives you feedback that you're not measuring up.
Pay attention to those signals, and be prepared to take an emotional journey of self-discovery. Perhaps your expectations of the rest of the world are out of alignment. Perhaps your expectations of yourself and how much you can accomplish are unrealistic.
Balance Periods
Must you be in balance every hour, every day, every month? Only you know, and you're the only one who can make the ultimate decision. In normal day-to-day circumstances, you might think of balance in weekly cycles: After you've spent a lot of hours working, how well are you doing about making time for yourself? How well are you doing at making time for your family?
There will be periods when we're dramatically out of balance: Times of family trauma, when we have to focus there rather than on business, or a long business trip that takes you away from family for weeks. The goal, however, is to regain balance as soon as possible.
Who Stays In Balance?
The quest for balance drives many people to spend more and more of their work hours outside the traditional office. If their employer is reluctant to support that need to remain closer to home, people will change employers.
A recent study at the Internal Revenue Service showed that 42% of employees who wanted to work from home and denied the opportunity would leave the agency.
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