#025 – Let’s Talk About Life/Work Balance

Where did the term work-life balance originate? And why did we decide to frame it this way?

Type work-life balance into Google, and 1.7 billion pages pop up. The first few pages of the search returns results like “Work-life Balance – Strategies and Where to Get Help” (depressing) and “How to Improve Work-Life Balance: 17 Tips” (also depressing, 17 tips seems like a lot).

After a stressful few weeks (work, uni, school holidays), I have been pondering my own balancing act, as work has increasingly encroached on life – and in a way that is not ideal for me.

Where did the term work-life balance originate? And why did we decide to frame it this way?

The idea that one should limit the amount of time spent at work dates back the late 1800s when the work hours of women and children were (finally) restricted (previously there was no restriction on the number of hours or the age of workers, meaning children who were 8 or 9 worked 12 hour days).

Fast-forward to the Women's Liberation Movement of the 1980s, when work–life balance was back at the forefront of discussion. To ‘accommodate’ women in the work force [aka over 50 per cent of the population in most developed countries – so the idea of accommodating women kind of riles me up] more flexible working conditions were adopted in many areas, and some workplaces *even* started to include maternity leave.

Today, spruiking ‘work-life’ balance is a key way for employers to attract and retain staff in many different industries, from medicine and investment banking, to the public service and teaching.

As part of this, a number of countries, including Australia, have introduced laws to enshrine ‘work-life’ balance, legislating a ‘right to disconnect’, meaning that employees don’t need to monitor or respond to emails or messages after hours.

To me, having to legislate such a right means that there are some pretty fundamental issues that need to be fixed.

Perhaps let’s start with the term ‘work-life’ balance. By order of importance we can assume that  work comes before life?

Is that really the way we should be viewing our existence?

According to OECD research, 12.5 per cent of Australians work what is termed "very long hours", defined as putting in more than 50 hours a week.  This places us 34th out of 41 OECD member nations. Australians work even more ‘very long hours’ than the UK (10.8 per cent) and US (10.4 per cent). But perhaps the picture is most alarming when ranked beside nations like Canada (3.3 per cent), Spain (2.5 per cent), Norway (1.4 per cent) and The Netherlands (0.3 per cent), for example.

You might look at the above and think, I don’t work very long hours!

But simple maths shows that working 8am to 6:30pm (with 30 mins for lunch), or 8am til 5pm and logging on after the kids go to bed for an hour or 2 puts you in the danger zone of 50 hours.

Research in Australia shows that health and wellbeing declines after working 39 hours each week.

And that decline in health and wellbeing is pretty serious. Research from the World Health Organization concludes that working 55 or more hours per week is associated with an estimated 35 per cent higher risk of a stroke and a 17 per cent higher risk of dying from ischemic heart disease, compared to working 35-40 hours a week.

Sounds to me that we need to start running at ‘life-work’ balance, with an emphasis on life first and work second.

This subtle reframe is significant.

By putting life first (which is not always easy!) and work second in the way we speak about the issue, we intrinsically start to view things a little differently.

The term balance is also tricky. Am I trying to balance things for today, this week, this project, or this year? For some people, they will want balance and predictability on a daily or weekly basis. For others, they might be happy to deal with a few months of intense work followed by a chunk of time off. Knowing where you sit on this spectrum is key to making life-work work for you.

Earlier in my career - and before kids - I was ok to balance over the longer term. I had more time, more bandwidth, and generally more of myself to give.

Fast forward life - now with 3 young children – I have a much smaller bandwidth for many things (ill-fitting shoes, recipes with too many ingredients, kids clothing with buttons, clothes that require ironing, long meetings…).

My threshold for being pulled in the direction of work at the expense of life is much lower and calculated over a much shorter time horizon as I try to balance the needs of work, family and most important of all – my own health and wellbeing.

I might not get it right all the time, but getting clear on what is most important to me and my own health and wellbeing makes it much easier to put myself above work, and even above my children. Writing down that I put myself above my children made me reflexively want to soften it, to not seem selfish.

For mothers in particular, we are socially conditioned to put everyone else’s needs first. The strong feminist in me riles against this. But what about my needs! And so I have learned (often the hard way) that if I don’t put me first in the life-work equation, no one else will.

It’s a version of the prioritisation exercise I wrote about in post #20 on creating an ‘I don’t’ list.

How do I put myself first? I don’t do after hours work social events because I value eating dinner with my kids more. I don’t fold or put away kids laundry – I make my 5 and 7 year old do their own. I don’t pursue perfection anymore, at work or in life – there are better ways to spend my time. And I don’t do work over life.

I listened to a podcast episode of Feel Better, Live More this week, where host Dr Rangan Chatterjee interviews Dr Gabor Maté on the 5 life lessons people learn too late. They speak about the regret people have at the end of their lives about working too much. The emphasis here is on too. We all need to work, and for many of us we are lucky enough to derive great pleasure and meaning from our work. How we define too much work is deeply personal and will differ for everyone. But I think we all innately know when we hit too much work. We feel a tightness rather than a lightness in everything we do. We do work first and life second. And we might do this unconsciously rather than exercising our own power and self-awareness in the matter. 

I love this quote from David Foster Wallace: “It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out."

So it’s time to get conscious, get deliberate and start talking about how we manage life and work in our adult worlds. No one is going to do it for you!

So this week, Be Like Wham!, and Choose Life!

Alicia