6 reasons to live your life the way that you want
Everyone has different priorities in their lives. Some people are really into their kids and family. Some are deep in their faith. Some are perhaps into something less mainstream like cosplay or endurance sports. One of the challenges that has emerged over time is how to ‘balance’ these life priorities with work.
In the pre-industrial revolution days on the farm, seasons and cycles dictated the work. You could philosophize as much as you wanted but someone had to get up and milk the cows. Someone had to get the hay raked before it rained. Someone had to cut enough firewood to survive the winter. These activities weren’t so much ‘work’ they were ‘life’. Into those seasons of work/life the pastoral wove family and faith. It had a nice rhythm to it but was typically ‘brutish and short’*.
As we humans rolled into the industrial era the work was again very well defined. You stood at your station and shined widgets for the assembly of widget-mobiles 8 to 12 hours a day. A guy with a tie and a stop watch stood behind you and tried to figure out how you could shine 2% more widgets per hour. Your time was cleanly partitioned into work time and non-work time.
In the non-work time you could have a picnic, go to church, get warm at a public house or work on your next novel. It is a simple set up. There’s no conflict or balancing of work and life. The guy with the stop watch doesn’t care how efficiently you use your church or pub time. He is only concerned with the time between punch in and punch out.
After WWII, when Drucker was talking about the ‘knowledge worker’ things start to get a bit stickier. The elements of work and life start to blur for the ‘company man’. This is where the zero-sum thinking starts. This is where we start to see white collar workers letting work crowd out everything else in their lives.
We all know these people. It’s the 80-hour a week lawyer, the come-in-first-leave-last manager who glances at her watch when you walk by the door and the Saturday morning staff meeting executive, like Sam Walton.
Is there a correlation between the hours worked and the output? Sure, there is, but it’s non-linear. It suffers greatly from diminishing returns. Is it evil or morally wrong to work 80 hours a week at your profession? Of course not, for some people that aligns perfectly with their vision of themselves and their core values.
But, not everyone. I would say most us would be better off figuring out how to be more effective in our roles as opposed to how to work more hours at it.
I’ve rambled too long in this preamble. (Maybe I should call it a pre-ramble?) Here’s the current situation challenging many of us in the modern work force. You want to find a way to ‘balance’ or ‘integrate’ your work with your other life priorities. Is it possible?
The only way you can have a chance of finding balance or integration with your life and your work is to have some idea about what is important to you. This may take some introspection on your part, which I don’t have space to walk you through today. Let’s say you place a certain priority on your health, or on your family, or on your faith – whatever your core values are – these are the things you now must integrate as best you can.
If you don’t know what is important to you then you really can’t blame work and career for filling up that void.
Here are 6 reasons to structure your work/life integration as you see fit.
- Nobody cares, in fact they will be impressed.
When your boss is scheduling Saturday meetings or showing up in the office at 5AM, or, my personal favorite, wanting to have a long conversation about the sales pipeline, account by account every Friday at 5PM, is it really possible for you to go against the grain and the company culture and do something different?
As it turns out, yes it is not only possible, but if you do it right it will set you apart. You don’t even need to ask for permission most of the time. Just leave the office and go run for an hour and a half. No one is going to care. The key is to do this normatively different thing with positive confidence. Assume the power and conviction. Don’t slink around or act apologetic. Don’t make a big show of it. Just do it like it is the right thing to do. Because it is the right thing to do for you.
You’ll be surprised how little anyone cares, especially if you have blown it up to be a big deal in your head.
- If they do care, then you’re in the wrong place.
What if someone does put up a stink? What if they do care? What if that boss rolls their eyes or starts a passive aggressive campaign? I think you have your answer, then don’t you? First, you precipitate a conversation about what is important. You get to ask the question of what outcomes are we trying to attain here? Why are we really that wrapped up in measuring activity if I can give you the same or a better outcome another way?
And if the answer is ‘because we said so’ then the activity is not about outcomes it is about some weird power dynamic and you need to find a better gig or negotiate a better deal. Either way you get your answer and you do what’s right based on what’s important to you. If there’s a mismatch, then you are better off knowing about it than suffering in silence.
- You are leading through your actions.
Another funny thing happens when you start making up your own norms around work/life integration. The other lemmings lift their heads up and stare at you in amazement. You become a leader. You have just given permission to others to adjust their work/life integration rules.
You have led by example. You have made a positive change in the world.
- Working harder is zero sum thinking
When you really scrutinize work cultures that champion the hours spent what you will find is zero sum thinking. The theory is that you only have so much time, so therefore you need to allocate as much as possible to your work or you won’t be successful. That is not only zero-sum thinking it is also scarcity thinking.
When you start trying to better align your work/life with your core values you will have to flip that scarcity thinking over and create an abundance mind set. When you see time as abundant then integration is a different calculus.
The hallmark of company cultures that are set in a scarcity mindset is secrecy. I can’t share any information with you or with the customers or you might use it against me.
If you’re in a company with a scarcity culture, you probably want to get out of there.
- It’s not about working less, it’s about aligning the work.
I am not saying that you need to work less. In fact, once you align your work with your core values and integrate it into your life you may work more. There will be an urgency of purpose, because you own the work and that allows you to be very effective. An abundance culture doesn’t mean everything is smooth sailing. There will be failures and setbacks and leaning in that require grit and intensity. But because it is all part of an integrated work/life bundle it will be ok.
This is not about working less or even work-life balance. It’s about integrating your life around what is important to you and spending every ounce of energy you have on that package.
- Create authenticity, not work/life balance.
This whole work/life balance topic can be a lot of overblown hooey. The single mother working double fast food shifts and a janitorial job at night doesn’t have the luxury to think about it. How do you make it authentic?
The core or essence of this whole exercise comes back around to what is important to you? If you can do nothing else but figure that out then you will have a measuring stick to start gauging how to allocate your hours, your efforts and your passions.
If you know your core values then you can act authentically in all your life works.
Bringing it all together.
If we get beyond the philosophy of work, this discussion comes down to a few key points. That’s why you care.
First, there is no such thing as work/life balance per se. How you spend your time is an outgrowth of what you believe. It may take you a lifetime to learn this.
Second, it’s not about working less. It’s about finding the right things for you to throw yourself into.
Third, it all comes back to understanding your core values and measuring your balance or integration against those.
*Sidebar*
(Be the impressively well-read person at your holiday party by using that Thomas Hobbes quote. He is describing how life will be for those poor souls who try to live outside of society. Here’s the full quote:
“No arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death: and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, 1651.
This is a good segue. It’s not just me being pedantic again. I’ve never read Hobbes. I suppose I would if the flight was long enough and the cocktails were encouraging enough.
It’s a good segue because Hobbes was a classic zero-sum thinker. We’ll come back to that later. )