No thank you – I’ll gladly take the wobbles!

Work Life Balance. How to achieve a healthy work/life balance. Five steps to balance your Work vs. Life dynamic. Variations on these headlines have been popping up all over the place this year. Every magazine has the latest expert with a new or revamped method to achieve a balance between your work and your life.

How to achieve a healthy work/life balance. Five steps to balance your Work vs. Life dynamic. Variations on these headlines have been popping up all over the place this year. Every magazine has the latest expert with a new or revamped method to achieve a balance between your work and your life.

I object. Scratch that. I STRONGLY object. I don’t like the phrasing because it sets up a binary win or lose scenario. Either you find balance, or you do not. If you don’t achieve the goal of work/life balance, then you have failed to achieve your goal and failure is bad, so you are now a bad, bad failure.

Yes, this is over simplifying, but the idea makes sense to me. My work and my personal life are not balanced. They could never be balanced because balance implies you have somehow managed to make both things equal. A scale is not balanced if one of the things being measured is heavier than the other. In reality, there are times when work is a priority. If you have an unexpected deadline, a horrific web-site crash, a customer service nightmare – all of these scenarios would warrant spending more time working to fix the problem. Anyone who knows an accountant is well aware that the months leading up to Tax filing are “no-gos” for spending time out to dinner, vacations, and such because accountants are holed up performing number alchemy for clients.

Also, work/life balance separates work from your life. But, isn’t your career a huge part of your life? Rather than make an endless to-do list of tasks and trying to categorize each one as either part of work or life how about just living?

Every profession has times where getting the job done requires a skewed prioritization of time. At the same time, if I’m on vacation visiting with family then I am not going to be on the phone with work or checking email 24/7. Why? Because for me, vacation is notably defined by an absence of work.

Instead of trying to do the impossible I prefer to think of how best to prioritize my life. Sometimes I give priority to my personal life. Sometimes I give work a priority. There are times when personal events may pre-empt work and vice versa, but this method works for me.

So, write books, create blog posts, and make videos about a system that will help people achieve a healthy work-life balance. I will keep my unbalanced life. If there are added wobbles here and there that is OK – the best adventures happen when you lose balance and fall off-course.