Is work-life balance a myth?

Think about your workweek. How many times have you traded off something important in your life for something important in your job?

And how many times have you complained — or heard a friend or colleague complain — about feeling out of balance between home and the office?

Achieving the elusive work-life balance is difficult for many professionals who must weigh the demands of a 24/7 workplace against family needs and personal interests.

But what if there’s simply no truth in the idea that work-life balance can even be achieved? It’s a topic several LinkedIn Influencers weighed in on recently.

Overworked professionals

“The idea of achieving work-life balance is... rooted in the minds of ambitious yet overworked professionals who want to ‘have it all’ — work and play, career and family,” wrote Holly Hamann, co-founder and chief marketing officer at TapInfluencer.

“I don’t believe there is such a thing as work-life balance. It’s all life. Work usually takes priority over the rest, however, because work is what we spend the majority of our day doing, it financially supports our dreams and it’s a core part of our identities,” she wrote. “Add mobile technology to our career-driven lives, and work priorities now have the potential to take over our personal lives.”

That threatens our relationships, health and overall happiness, Hamann wrote. “Every day, we unknowingly hand over precious power to alerts and notifications — distractions ironically set up to ensure we don’t miss a thing. When we’re constantly bombarded with these bits of information, priorities and distractions start to run together, and we have a hard time knowing what to focus on.”

How do you know your priorities have gone awry?

“I believe it’s when you’ve reached a point where the urgency to react to something is disproportionate to its priority,” she wrote.

Historical anomaly

Paul Herbert, vice president of Solution Design at Symbolist, added: “This whole idea of work-life balance is starting to unravel before our very eyes. Some of us cling to it tightly, hoping we can continue to ignore emails and text messages between 6pm and 8am. But you know you can’t. Work and life aren’t apart any more... and the reality is that work and life are intertwined.”

To truly understand the concept, it is important to recognise that the idea of a work-life balance is more historical anomaly than anything else, Herbert wrote. Up until about the early 1900s “factories created the need and the opportunity for work-life balance”.

Factory life meant shifts and predictable regularity in schedules. But, wrote Herbert, that approach no longer applies.

“That idea — of the clock as a divider between work-life — is history. The present, and the future, is about the merging of those concepts,” Herbert wrote. “Work-life balance isn’t about separation any more — it is about consolidation.”

Or as Henry David Thoreau said: “The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.” — BBC