NEVER GET SO BUSY MAKING A LIVING THAT YOU FORGET TO MAKE A LIFE

Balance is not something you find, It's something you create.

Do we really understand the importance of a proper Work-Life Balance as an Employer or as an Individual in Today’s World when having a Personal and Social Life besides an existing Professional Life has become really important? Since the pandemic hit us we have seen a lot of layoffs as well as a lot of people leaving their jobs citing Mental Health Issues, Improper Work-Life Balance, Burnout, Stress, etc. We are becoming open as a society and as a person when it comes to addressing these issues more and more nowadays because people are starting to become more and more realistic in their approach towards life and also they are prioritizing their needs and happiness but the question is are we really making an effort or trying to implement all of this?

Let’s start talking about what really is Work-Life Balance and How Important it is. For so many and myself included our days are filled with a million small interruptions and this is true even on our days off. Maybe you have taken a call at the beach, texted your boss from the grocery store or emailed a colleague while on a picnic with your family. We have convinced ourselves that these behaviors’ are no big deal. It’s just one email but there’s a real cost to these interruptions and there are smart strategies we can all take to better protect our time. These moments seem so small at the time and yet research suggests they add up to a tremendous loss.

When you think of work-life balance what comes to mind? Perhaps you see scales with work on one side and life on the other. Personally, I see opposing sides pulling for my attention and I feel a sense of pressure, pressure to get it right in a feeling of guilt like I have to choose between a career that I thoroughly enjoy and a family that I dearly love. What I don’t feel is a sense of inner peace and happiness which I think is the ultimate goal. Throughout my life’s journey, I have learned a new way to view the work-life balance that won’t leave you feeling guilty. Throughout our lives, we are all given checkpoints. These are moments and experiences that help us decide what we want to do with this one precious life that we have been gifted. They help us decide who we are and who we want to be and they can even help us realign if we have gotten lost along the way.

I am going to be sharing with you one of my personal experiences, and how it helped me reshape my life and rethink my priorities. It is one shared by all humanity and it was when the COVID-19 pandemic hit. So I was still in my Post Grads Course and I was staying in Chennai when “Janta Curfew” was introduced which unfortunately happened to be my birthday as well. I was staying in a PG accommodation and the entire PG was empty excepting me and one of my roommates. We couldn’t leave because our homes were in Kolkata and Lucknow whereas other people stayed in nearby states. I had to submit my dissertation questionnaire as well in the coming week. Things were crazy with me at that time and I didn’t know what to do. My dad arranged a Flight Ticket for me on an emergency basis and I finally flew back home by the last available flight from Chennai. All semblance of balance was thrown out the window. This was the universal checkpoint for all of humanity to start paying attention to what really mattered. This forced us all into our homes to take a close look at ourselves, our lives, and our relationships. If there were problems, they were amplified.

When we talk about wanting work-life balance I think what we are really looking for is actually a feeling, a feeling that we are living meaningful lives, a feeling that we are living in alignment with our personal missions. I am no longer striving for work-life balance, I am now looking for something more like work-life harmony where work and life support each other and flow together kind of like a beautiful dance. So how can you have work-life harmony? I have 3 steps that I think would get you started. The 1st step is to make your personal lives and your careers meaningful. This is a big task. It means really taking the time to reflect, to get to know yourself, What matters to you? Who are you? What are your core values? Then you have to make sure that you integrate those things into your life and into your career. There’s not a magic recipe here saying you have to work for 8 hours a day, then you have to spend 4 hours with family and have 2 hours to yourself. This is going to be a very unique recipe for you based on what matters to you and what season it is in your life.

The 2nd step is to add more life to your workday. Stop saving all of the fun, all of the family, all of the self-care for before work or after work hours. You have to start sprinkling all of that good stuff into the work day with a work-life integration model. A recent study done by Microsoft took 14 people and they measured the electrical activity in their brains using an EEG. They had these people do four 30-minute back-to-back zoom meetings. What they found is that beta waves related to stress increased. They also had changes in the brain associated with less engagement. Now they took this same group and they had them take 10-minute breaks after each 30-minute zoom meeting to meditate and what they found is that beta waves related to stress stabilized and changes in the brain associated with engagement improved. So what this tells me is that taking regular breaks during your work day for all that other stuff in your life is not only important for your health and your well-being but also for your performance as well.

Now the 3rd step is for employers to recognize that their employees are capable of working from home. Give your employees the ability to make flexible work schedules that support themselves and their families as well. So when it comes down to it work-life balance is not the key to happiness but however, but knowing your mission and living in alignment with it may be. The pandemic has shown us that life is precious. When you are faced with the end of your life what impact will you have wanted to have on the world? What would you want your last words to be? I think that the most meaningful last words would be mission accomplished.

The constant creep of work into our personal lives can increase our stress and undermine our happiness. So just what is the cost? In one study, researchers recruited parents who were visiting a science museum with their kids. Some parents were told to check their phones as much as possible; others were told to check their phones as little as possible. After the visit, parents who used their phones reported that the experience was significantly less meaningful. They also felt much lonelier. In another study, Tourists who were asked to have their phones out while visiting an iconic church remembered fewer details a week later. And in my research, employees who were paid for their performance spent increasingly less time interacting with their friends and family, and more and more time interacting with colleagues and clients.

These constant interruptions come at a cost to organizations too. Companies lose 32 days of productivity each year to employee depression which is often caused by the stress and burnout of our always-on culture. People who spent an hour focused on one activity felt happier than those who divided their attention. Despite knowing better, I, too, have found myself focusing on “urgent work distractions” over important life moments. When you add up all of these moments, the sum total is a life short-changed in meaning, joy, connection, and even memory. As we remake our models of work in the wake of the pandemic, now is our opportunity to create a new culture that respects time. And the way to make this really big change is through small steps that we can take right now. The 1st step that we need to take is to Reframe Rest. Reflect for a moment about what you think about when you hear the word “rest”. Sounds amazing, right? But in my mind, I immediately worry about not being productive enough or letting down my colleagues. When we do have time off, we need to find ways in which we can enjoy the present moment and savor the leisure time that we have available, as opposed to seeing it as an unproductive barrier to our work.

One specific strategy we can take is to treat our upcoming weekend like a Vacation. On Friday afternoon, jot down how you would act and behave as if you were on a holiday. Maybe you and your partner will buy a bottle of wine and watch online clips of the Eiffel Tower. Maybe you will visit a Local Café and listen to some live music or maybe you will go for a long walk in the middle of the day with no phone and no agenda. The plan doesn’t have to be expensive or extravagant.

Another strategy you can take is to create clear boundaries for your time off. Instead of saying “I am out of the office. Feel free to slack me whenever,” and say “I’ll be offline. Call me only if it’s urgent.” To uphold these personal goals, work together as a team. Set team goals for personal time. Do it publicly, collect data, and hold each other accountable. These goals could sound like, “I will not check email between 6:00 and 8:00 p.m;” “I will have dinner with my family four nights a week;” or “I will go for a jog midday.” Check-in on your team’s progress and see how everyone’s doing. If you or your teammates are unsuccessful, work together to accomplish personal goals.

Lastly, you can negotiate for more time to prevent work from creeping into your personal life. What does this look like in practice? You can ask for more time on adjustable deadlines at work. If your client asks for a deliverable Monday morning, ask for an extension until Tuesday afternoon so you don’t find yourself working on your well-deserved weekend. And don’t worry too much about reputation. Quality truly is the metric that matters the most. I have seen, that employees who proactively asked for more time reported lower levels of stress and burnout and were seen as more committed and professional by their colleagues. These are small but powerful changes to not only reframe rest but to reclaim it. Once you discover the profound impact that these changes can have, you will feel empowered to demand that others respect and accommodate your approach to time. Maybe they will even feel inspired to piece together the fractured moments of their lives too.

I have a few more observations that I would like to share with you today. The 1st is, that if society is to make any progress on this issue, we need an honest debate. But the trouble is so many people talk so much rubbish about work-life balance, all the discussions about flexi-time or dress-down Fridays or Paternity Leave only serve to mask the core issue, which is that certain job and career choices are fundamentally incompatible with being meaningfully engaged on a day-to-day basis with a young family. The 1st step in solving any problem is acknowledging the reality of the situation you are in. And the reality of the society we are in is that there are thousands and thousands of people out there leading lives of quiet, screaming desperation where they work long, hard hours at jobs they hate, to enable them to buy things they don’t need, to impress people they don’t like. It is my contention that going to work on a Friday in jeans and a T-shirt isn’t really getting into the nub of the issue.

The 2nd observation I would like to make is really to face the truth that governments and corporations aren’t going to solve this issue for us. We should stop looking outside. It is up to us as individuals to take control and responsibility for the type of lives that we want to lead. If you don’t design your life, someone else will design it for you, and you may just not like their idea of balance. It is particularly important – this isn’t the World Wide Web, Is It? I am about to get fired. It is particularly important that you never put the quality of your life in the hands of a commercial corporation. I am not talking here just about the bad companies, “The Abattoirs of the Human Soul” as I call them, I am talking about all companies because commercial companies are inherently designed to get as much out of you as they can get away with. It’s in their nature, it’s in their DNA, it’s what they do, even the good, well-intentioned companies. On the one hand, putting childcare facilities in the workplace is wonderful and enlightening. On the other hand, it’s a nightmare that just means you spend more time at the bloody office. We have to be responsible for setting and enforcing the boundaries that we want in our life.

The 3rd observation is that we have to be careful with the time frame that we choose upon which to judge our balance. I sat down and I wrote out a detailed, step-by-step description of the ideal balanced day that I aspired to. And it went like this: Wake up well rested after a good night’s sleep. Exercise and Walk. Have Breakfast. Read a Book. Work for 4 Hours. Have Lunch. Work for 4 and a Half Hours. Go for a Walk. Meditate for a While. Read a Book. Watch something online. Spend some time with your parents. Go to bed.

How often do you think I have that day? We need to be realistic. You can’t do it all in one day. We need to elongate the time frame upon which we judge the balance in our life but we need to elongate it without falling into the trap of the “I’ll have a life when I retire when my kids have left home when my partner has divorced me, my health is failing, I have got no friends or interest left.” A day is short, “after a retire” is too long. It has got to be a middle way.

The 4th observation is we need to approach balance in a balanced way. There are other parts to life. There is the intellectual side, there is the emotional side, and there is the spiritual side. And to be more balanced, I believe we have to attend to all of those areas. That can be daunting because people say “Bloody hell, Mate, I haven’t got time to get fit and you want me to go to church and call my Mother.” And I understand, I truly understand how that can be daunting. But an incident that happened a couple of months ago gave me a new perspective. It was Saraswati Puja and I received my 1st Salary in Feb 2022. I took my parents out for dinner after office on Saturday Night. This is the 1st time I had taken them out for Dinner. They had this look on their face that resembled satisfaction, happiness, and a precious moment for them. It was a small gesture but it meant soo much for them as my parents. They were happy to finally see their daughter independent, happy and satisfied. I hadn’t done anything. I hadn’t gifted them something really expensive like a Saree or a Watch. Now, my point is that small thing's matter. Being more balanced doesn’t mean dramatic upheaval in your life. With the smallest investment in the right places, you can radically transform the quality of your relationships and the quality of your life. Moreover, I think it can transform society because if enough people do it, we can change society’s definition of success, away from the moronically simplistic notion that the person with the most money when he dies wins, to a more thoughtful and balanced definition of what a life well-lived looks like. And that, I think is an idea worth spreading.

What if I told you that you shouldn’t be striving for work-life balance and that everything we are thinking about work-life balance leading to happiness is wrong. People are also suffering in the workplace. I saw a lot of individuals struggling with burnout and this is more of a concern now with the COVID-19 pandemic. When it comes down to it the old model of work-life balance simply isn’t working. The pandemic has left people wanting and needing more, more happiness, more fulfillment, more meaning, and more connection at work and at home.