Forget Balance. Think Kaleidoscope

The Human-Centred Workplace

For lots of people, the concept of ‘work-life balance’ doesn’t feel quite right. It’s something of an elusive myth.

Like any myth, it’s tied up with belief. We all like to believe there’s a way to have it all, all of the time.

Some people believe they’ve found the way – well, in theory, anyway.

But in the real world it’s unlikely to happen.

And if it seems to be happening some of the time, it has very little to do with ‘balance’.

Work-life balance: what does it mean, anyway?

You, your family and your staff are human beings. In daily life, you can’t totally separate the human and the personal aspects from what you might consider the ‘work’ components.

‘Leave your home life at home’ is just as impossible a requirement as ‘Don’t bring your work home’.

You could even say the term ‘work-life balance’ is not useful at all.

That’s because the concept of ‘balance’ depends on taking two discrete variables and having them in equilibrium. That doesn’t usually work when human factors are involved.

And there are several reasons why.

We can’t separate work from life

The first is this: human beings are complex and inter-relational. They tend not to segregate work-related matters. They don’t package them neatly and separately. Neither can they store them ‘out of sight and out of mind’ while getting on with ‘real life’.

For example, how often do you think through a work problem while having a shower or cooking a meal? Work intrudes into any number of personal situations.

It works equally the other way. People don’t push aside family, personal, financial and a dozen other types of concerns, just because it’s time for ‘work’.

Trying to achieve ‘work-life balance’ starts with a wrong assumption.
It supposes this kind of compartmentalisation is possible and healthy.

For most people it just isn’t.

We can’t measure the unmeasurable

There’s a second reason why the concept breaks down. It suggests we can easily give an accurate weighting to those things that count as work and those that don’t.
We can’t.

We might try, by calculating how much time, energy, effort or thought we are prepared to spend on each. But that isn’t possible either.

Even if we take the crudest way of measuring the work component  –  the number of hours we spend in the workplace  –  we all know how inadequate a gauge of ‘work’ that really is.

To confirm it, we only have to look at how two different people might spend a defined seven-hour work day and what they achieve in that time.

We also realise how differently one person might spend two days of identical length; it depends on so many variables.

The truth is, work and life can’t be compartmentalised, measured and balanced. At times, they can’t even be distinguished clearly from each other.

Life is many things and work is one of them. For most of us, these things merge and overlap, to varying degrees.

At different times and for different reasons, we focus on some of them more keenly… until the focus shifts again. Various things preoccupy us more or less, and for varying amounts of time.

Even when our time is strictly ‘allocated’ – either to work or non-work activities – how can we possibly determine how much of our energy, effort or thought is genuinely directed where it should be?

Work-life balance: the best laid plans …

We often try to manage arbitrary time slots for work, rest and play:

• Some (as I do) try to ‘chunk’ time for highly specific tasks or for deliberate leisure. Sometimes it works

• Some people explore biological patterns – perhaps their circadian rhythms and seasonal changes – and try to work (or not work) in harmony with these natural patterns

• Others study the effects of environmental stimuli on energy flow and try to create optimal physical and mental states for peak performance.

We might feel we’re closer to the answers, but the unique combination of influences that make up an individual life is as unfathomable as it ever was.

A traditional comparison is with the ebb and flow of the tides – but human life is nowhere near as predictable as the ocean.

Add to that our ever-changing capacity to deal with everything that washes over us.

On any given day, an infinite number of infinitely variable factors – including our health, our current mood, external events and circumstances and even the weather – makes our ‘dealing’ ability predictably unpredictable.

And that’s a whole new story….

If it isn’t broken…

All this is normal. And natural.

Setting up a pre-defined, fixed and evenly balanced plan to ‘do’ work and life might look good on paper. We might even manage to keep to it for a day, a week or more.

But the weights will shift; the scales will tip. And our changing levels of involvement in work, family or personal concerns – or all of the above – will slip and slide into glorious imbalance, settle for a while, then readjust themselves into a different configuration.

The only real pattern is that there is no detectable or consistent pattern.

It’s a kaleidoscope. It’s infinitely variable. As your life moves, the shapes and patterns change.

And this way of living doesn’t need to be mended, because it isn’t broken.

It’s perfectly and imperfectly human.