Down with Work Life Balance!

According to Paul McFedries excellent Wordspy website www.wordspy.com, the phrase 'Work Life Balance' was coined in 1986.  The phrase appeared sporadically in papers across the world over the subsequent 10 years, rising to 34 mentions in the Nexis newspaper sample in 1997.  Four years later, 435 mentions across the sample. By 2010 over 1500 'Work Life Balance' mentions.  The media (and therefore the people) were becoming obsessed. Then, thank goodness, a drop.

Long may this decline continue. Down with Work Life Balance! And down with the nonsense update "Life Work Balance", too!

We must give huge thanks to the early pioneers of greater life balance.  In 2002, for example, Simon Murphy, the leader of Britain's Labour MEP's, walked away from the "undoubted rewards of a fulfilling ego-boosting career" in order to spend more time with his family. 

Ground-breaking at the time, his explanatory statement - "Being a father and a husband is my number one priority even at the cost of a career I have spent my adult life pursuing", made headline national news and was covered in numerous comment columns.

Though in so many ways inspirational, even today, his decision also feels terribly depressing.

This idea that a successful, fulfilling career is incompatible with spending time with the family must be challenged. Yet, in fact, I believe we are exacerbating the problem by continuing our quest for this outdated view of balance - 1,452 newspaper mentions of the phrase persisted in 2011.

Balance is defined as 'an even distribution of weight enabling someone or something to remain upright and steady'. By adding the words 'work' and 'life' we understand that we are looking for an even distribution of weight across the two, as on a pair of scales.

The very notion of work and life being equally and oppositely weighted is both un-inspirational and overly simplified.   It suggests that we:
1.)  Target working more than the standard working hours (standard working hours, 5 days a week, a 16 hour day awake - work should account for less than one third of our wakeful time)

2.) Pitch the whole of the rest of our life components against one, work.

Thank goodness that we have made some progress. That, for many, nowadays, being a parent and a partner is a "number one priority". However, for many others it is simply not acceptable, nor optimal for our economy, to walk away from the "fulfilling, ego boosting..career that we have spent our life pursuing". We need to be fulfilled and we need our egos to be boosted.

I would like to suggest that we take a rather more sophisticated approach.  We aim for a 'balanced life'. 

A truly balanced life is determined by the individual on their own terms and can be captured in their own, highly personalised Life Scorecard. Each component is intricately weighted, targeted and assessed.  It can't be simplified to two components on a set of weighing scales.