Almost all magazines I opened today had an article about work life balance. Just pure coincidence or a hidden message? And not that I would be superstitious in any way. I read one, then the other and further I dug the more agitated I'd become. They are talking about healthy drinks, vitamins, healthy food, the need to exercise, blah, blah blah. That's all fine and nice, and even healthy, but there is much more to work life balance than healthy eating.
The major problem people face today is that they are overworked, they do not sleep enough and they spend more time with their work colleagues than their family. One of the main reasons we have ended up behaving so strangely is the push for higher productivity and I've covered that in my previous post. The other problem is greed and our obsession with achievements driven by the culture of continuous promotions. Yep, they work to a certain extent but the impact on our society is almost irreversible. Crime rates are increasing, close tied communities in their original form have more or less disappeared and as incredible as it may seem, morality and family values have become close to heresy.
So what can and should we do? Well, 24 hours can be nicely split into three 8-hour slots, each used for different purposes. We should work 8 hours, sleep another 8 hours and be involved in family life for another 8 hours. That is a fundamental requirement for work life balance and no diet will ever replace this. In fact there is plenty of scientific evidence behind this statement. For some people, running some types of family businesses for instance, 16 hours of work and family time will be blended but the end result should be that your family life or in deed your work life and sleeping do not suffer. What is obvious from all of this is that achieving work life balance is far more difficult than achieving an extremity in favor of one or the other 8-hour slot.
Real heroes are therefore people who can still achieve a degree of work-related glory but manage to keep the work life balance intact, including the stuff that magazines are so successfully selling. Why? Because when old and unimportant you should be able to look back at your life and see an encyclopedia rather than a professional dictionary, and then enjoy the remaining time filling up encyclopedic gaps rather than being confined to worn out specialism.
