subject: Work-Life Balance - Why it Doesn't Work [print this page] Work-Life Balance - Why it Doesn't Work Work-Life Balance - Why it Doesn't Work
For years people have struggled with trying to find a balance between their work and personal lives. It's a constant battle to not work too many hours, bring work home or focus too much on work. We all want to focus on our family and friends and the things that we say are important but we always have this "work" thing hanging out there so we just try to balance it. And why does it seem like we are trying to balance our personal lives with work. I mean, does anyone say, "You know, I've been seeing way too much of my family lately, I need focus on spending more time at work." Of course they don't. We are always working too much and trying to find ways to spend time living the rest of our lives. Why does this struggle even exist? Why do we spend so much time trying to balance work and life?
There are two primary reasons why we as a workforce constantly struggle with this:
A lot of people work at a job that they would quit today of they could. What this tells us is that their job doesn't really mean anything to them. As humans we are created to do meaningful work so we try to balance that lack of meaning with the things that do give meaning to our lives. People aren't working in an environment that lets them utilize their unique skills and abilities. We all have things that we are naturally good at and when we aren't allowed to use those skills in our work, work can be very unfulfilling. That leaves us searching for something that provides a purpose in our lives.
We all need to be able to do productive, meaningful work that we care about. It's just the way we are built. We can't help it, we can't fight it, that's just the way it is. So the concept of work-life balance is really a misconception anyway. We won't ever be able to truly balance something that we don't like with the things we think are important. We will always want to be spending more time doing the things that we like instead of doing the things we don't like.
As long as we work in jobs that we don't like or that are meaningless, we will continue to struggle with balancing our work life with the rest of our life. Only when we create a balanced life in which meaningful, productive work is simply one aspect will we be able to stop the balancing act.
