Sarahritchie17 I recently listened to a podcast called “Aligning Your Values with How You Invest Your Time | Warren Rustand.” It was an interview between Geoff Woods and Warren Rustand on The ONE Thing Podcast. During the interview (~ 27 minutes in), Rustand expressed that he doesn’t “subscribe to the notion that there’s such a thing as work-life balance.” He went on to explain how he views life as an integrated whole.
This isn’t the first time that I’d heard a massively successful life coach say that they don’t believe in work-life balance. Both Rachel and Dave Hollis have expressed similar sentiments in their podcasts and books. For this week’s post, I wanted to dig into work-life balance, find out if it does or doesn’t exist, and consider what it looks life in real life.
Does work-life balance exist?
I think the problem that these influencers are trying to express is that the “perfect” vision of work-life balance isn’t achievable.
In contrast, I believe that work-life balance does exist, and perhaps we’re just using the wrong models to express it. I think a lot of work-life balance models look like the ones below. In the captions, I’ll explain the problem with each one.
As far as the “perfect” work-life balance, I think that’s individual and that it changes season-to-season, week-to-week, and even day-to-day sometimes.
But before we dig into how you can define your own work-life balance (WLB), let’s backtrack for a second.
Why does this matter?
Here are just four of many reasons why it’s important to define what balance looks like for you:
- Avoid burnout – I think this is the obvious one. Having a life that’s not all work 24/7 keeps you from burning out. It is important for your health and well-being both physically and mentally. Allowing yourself to rest and recharge outside work ensures that you’ll have the energy to keep going day after day for your working years and beyond.
- Feel greater fulfillment – Instead of working towards success and happiness as an end goal, you start to seek out feelings of success and happiness in the present. When you make time for the things that matter to you and allow yourself to be fully present in the moment, you give yourself the space and grace to feel fulfilled.
- Make decisions easier – When you have clear priorities and boundaries, you can easily make tough decisions when they come up.
- Have successful relationships – Whether you have a family, significant other, or just friends and coworkers in your life right now, they are also affected by your work-life balance. If you want to sustain successful relationships with the people in your life, you need to be clear with them what your priorities are. When they already know how you’ll respond in stressful situations, they will likely have greater empathy and understanding for you instead of allowing the stress to create strain on the relationship.
How I model WLB for myself
With all that in mind, I believe the best way to model WLB is with a pie chart. I’m a visual learner, so a pie chart provides me an easy way to see how and where I want to be prioritizing my time and energy. I also know that I can only give a total of 100% of my effort on any given day.
In general, I can divide most of the things I do into four categories.
- Work
- Relationships
- Health & Wellness
- “One Thing” – Something specific I am working on improving at; currently it’s creating content for this blog.
From here, I estimated how much of my time I would ideally devote to these four things, based on the hours in a week that I would like to devote to each. (My health & wellness category is so big because I included meals and meal prep which tend to take a lot of time.) Here’s how it turned out:
Have you ever thought of WLB like this? How would you model your own WLB? I challenge you to create a graphic of what your personal balance looks like and reflect on where you are currently putting your time and energy. If you want to read more about what went into my pie chart and how I refined it even further, be sure to check out Part 2 here!
References and Additional Resources
- The ONE Thing with Geoff Woods Podcast: “Aligning Your Values with How You Invest Your Time | Warren Rustand”
- https://www.the1thing.com/blog/the-one-thing/work-life-balance/
- https://hbr.org/2021/01/work-life-balance-is-a-cycle-not-an-achievement
- https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20210302-why-work-life-balance-is-not-an-achievement
- https://www.mhanational.org/work-life-balance
- https://www.forbes.com/sites/deborahlee/2014/10/20/6-tips-for-better-work-life-balance/?sh=7535425729ff
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Cheers!
Sarah
[…] Work-life balance (WLB) can be a fluid and abstract concept and to some people, it may even seem unachievable. I write about that in Part 1 of this blog post, which you can find here. […]