Business Insight Zone

You’re fooling yourself.

You think there’s such a thing as “work/life balance.”

You think that there are two paths, one labeled “work” and the other labeled “life,” and that somehow you can travel down the two of them separately in a given day.

You feel stymied by work duties and life duties because you can’t get them to jibe.

Well, you’re not alone. I’m in that same cave with you, friend, trying to stay warm and dry. But let’s see if we can philosophize a little on this problem and find a better way of going forward.

Why is it like this?

I believe we routinely mismanage our time at work, and routinely fall into bad working habits, because we don’t acknowledge that work is as much a part of life as anything else. Let me make a comparison to illustrate:

You go into a restaurant. The staff is nice enough, but they’re slow to seat you and slow to serve you. The food isn’t all it was cracked up to be on the menu, and some of it was served cold. Your server never brought you a couple of the things you ordered, even though you asked more than once. When you raised the issue, it somehow got turned around so that it was your own fault. Despite all these disappointments, the bill was pretty steep.

Do you go back to that restaurant? That’s just the sort of place that most of us will take pains to avoid.

What we put up with.

Yet take what I’ve just described and translate it into the terms of the workplace. The people you work with are nice enough, but projects and communication are slow. Despite a lot of what looks like hard work, you end up making — and trying to sell — products that fit in the great mass of the unremarkable. Reasonable requests, whether for flextime or a new printer or an extra salary in your department, go unheeded. And when you raise the issue . . . somehow it’s your fault for not playing along. Yet you’re also expected to put in long hours, for something less than a dazzling rate of pay.*

“But it’s a paycheck,” you say. “It’s my job,” you say. “I gotta have a job.”

Sure. Of course. I’ve got a mortgage to pay, too. I know where you’re coming from.

But still there’s this nagging reality: we put up with junk in the workplace that we’d never accept in the rest of our lives, because somehow work is “different.” Here’s the bulletin: work is not different. Every hour of work moves you an hour closer to the grave — just like every hour of scrubbing toilets or snuggling babies or hiking to Machu Picchu.

In other words: Your whole life is One Big Workflow.

It’s all One Big Life you’re living. Sure, there are going to be hours in that life when you’re slogging it out in a budget meeting instead of having friends over for a barbecue. You’re going to spend hours of your life having uncomfortable conversations in quarterly reviews when you’d rather be curled up with a good book. It’s not all cocktails on the beach with your sweetheart, watching the sun set over the Pacific. That’s reality for most of us.

But here’s some of what doesn’t have to be part of that reality:

• “Workiness.”
• The avoidance of awkward “naive questions.”
• Crummy meetings that get you nowhere.
• An overstuffed inbox that brings you dread instead of helping you to get things accomplished.
• Crummy workplace rules that don’t allow you any flexibility with the other parts of your life.
• A long list of other lousy practices that weigh us down instead of freeing us up. (Why not share your un-favorites in the comments section below? Feel free to post under a pseudonym.)

For many of us, work is much more than a paycheck. It’s our main chance to reap accomplishments and fulfillment, and it’s a key driver for self-worth. Given that, doesn’t it make sense that we should pursue our work with a sense of enjoyment? And using standards that we would apply to the other parts of our lives?

My encouragement to you . . .

Take a few minutes now to review your working day, focusing on the biggest frustrations in it. Ask yourself whether you’d accept those frustrations if they were served up to you in a restaurant. And then reflect on these questions:

• Given that I’m spending a chunk of my life in this job, what can I do to maximize the return on my investment?
• Where do I waste my time? How can I arrange my time in bigger chunks so I can enjoy longer periods of Flow and get more done?
• What are the few most important things on my plate? How can I make sure that I’m spending my resources on those things instead of anything else?

You only have one life. Your time, and how you use it, runs in a single path through that life. So deal honestly with your your whole life — your One Big Workflow — as it progresses down that path.

~

* Let me be quick to point out that I’m not criticizing my employer. While Hoover’s isn’t perfect (it’s hampered by having to employ human beings, after all), it offers the best corporate working environment I’ve ever experienced. The people here are unfailingly nice — and indeed we’ve built a culture around that. There’s no nonsense when it comes to HR-type issues: If you’re sick, stay home. If you have a problem, ask for help and you’ll get it. Et cetera. All that being said, though, I’ve worked a lot of different places — good and bad — and I talk constantly with friends about how their work treats them. And heck, even the kindly folks who populate Hoover’s don’t claim to be saints. You tell me if I’ve painted an accurate picture of your workplace with this post.

Category: The working life