There truly is such a thing as achieving work/life balance. Take it from me, a recovering workaholic who wore 60-hour weeks like a badge of honor. (Sheesh, what was I thinking?)
First, let's get clear on the primary purpose of achieving work/life balance: It's about minimizing stress in your life. Much of the stress in a typical person's life is derived from work. You can say you've got work/life balance, but in addition to working full-time, you might participate in many activities with the kids, volunteer at the local homeless shelter, and exercise five days a week. If you're feeling stressed and tired, you haven't achieved the primary intent of work/life balance, which is to reduce stress. All you have done, in fact, is balance the degree of stress you have in your work life with the stress you have in your non-work life. So now, you have stress not only in your work life but also in your “life” life. Sure, it's balanced, but you're even more stressed than ever.
There are a few basic tenets that I have learned (the hard way, of course) regarding work/life balance:
- Work/life balance doesn't mean you never have to burn the midnight oil to get a project done. There will be times you will need to work hard to meet a deadline. What work/life balance does mean, though, is that burning the midnight oil will only be an exception, not a regular event.
- Achieving work/life balance doesn't give you a get-out-of-jail-free card to not work hard or only work a few hours a week — we were meant to work and to provide for ourselves. Work/life balance just means that work is done in moderation and not to an extreme.
- Realizing the quest for work/life balance means doing some serious soul searching. If you acknowledge you are a workaholic and don't want to change, then nothing I or anyone else might say to you will be worth much. Acknowledging that you are a workaholic is the first and most important step to getting on the road to work/life balance.
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Lonnie Pacelli is an internationally recognized author and is president of Leading on the Edge International. Lonnie has had over 20 years of leadership experience as an executive, project manager, developer, tester, analyst, trainer, consultant, and business owner. During his 11 years at Accenture, he built leadership expertise consulting with many Fortune 500 companies, including Motorola, Hughes Electronics, and Northrop Grumman. During his nine years at Microsoft, he continued building leadership expertise through the development of some of Microsoft’s internal systems, leading their corporate procurement group, managing their corporate planning group, and leading company-wide initiatives on continuous fiscal improvement and training-process optimization. He has successfully implemented projects ranging from complex IT systems to process reengineering to business strategies.
See more on Lonnie at www.leadingonedge.com and www.smallbizmadesimple.com.
