Work / Life balance or Balancing “Work within Life”
The case for a 3 day week, or less. Unrealistic or something think about and aspire to?
The phrase “work / life balance” has always left me feeling a bit uneasy. It suggests that they are two distinct parts of our “existence” and that there are only two. It also suggests to me that because there are only two and that they need to be balanced then they are of equal standing in terms of time allocation, effort, importance, aspiration, and reward (you could say input and output). Another common expression is “live to work, or work to live?” again, two parts to the equation.
If we look at this concept in terms of the time we spend Monday to Friday, when I consider my own time and that of many of my peers, the alarm goes off at 6 am, breakfast and preparing to go to “work” until 7 am travel to work for an hour arriving before 9 am. Work until 5.30 pm and home and ready to eat and enjoy the evening by 7 pm. Bed (or start getting ready for bed) no later than 10 pm, only to do it all over again the following day.
That leaves 3 hours a day, during the week, to fit in, what up until now has been referred to as, “life”.
When I look at “life” there are 10 general domains in which to pigeonhole how we spend our time which includes work and finance (these are linked for many) not as a separate part to life itself.
Here they are, not in any particular order of priority (not consciously anyway).
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So, we are left with 8 domains to fit into the 3 hours left at the end of the working day.
Some of us may be able to fit in a trip to the gym before or after work (that covers health and fitness), so now we are left with 7.
Allowing for 8 hours sleep a night during the weekends then we have 47 hours left to spend on less physically and mentally demanding aspects of our life that are the pillars of building our psychological wellbeing which fundamentally positively contributes to improving our satisfaction with life. That’s almost 28% of our time to attend to 70% of our needs (or 41% of our waking hours).
- 56 hours asleep
- 65 hours “work and finance”
- 47 hours everything else
Of course, we get to work on other domains during our time at work and companies are beginning to understand the value of developing employees in the areas of community, growth & learning while employees are at work. Many of us also have close friendships that are formed as part of our work and vocation.
Now imagine if every life domain took equal priority over our time, each would be allocated 10% of our waking hours, work and finance would then be given 22.4 hours in total. Spread over a “traditional” 5-day working week then that would equate to a little under 4.5 hours per day, and we get the weekend to ourselves without work interference. That’s less than half of what we allocate right now.
Unrealistic or something think about and aspire to?
That’s life balance.