Work Life Balance – Myth or Reality?

A holistic approach to success allows us to evaluate how balanced our lives are, given the way we prioritize our day-to-day activities.

If you are on a fixed income, a general increase in the cost of living will force you to find additional means of making ends meet or to keep up with your current lifestyle.

This can include taking up a second or third job, working longer hours, starting a side business, or leaving employment altogether to start your own business.

These options will usually require you to sacrifice more of your free time for money until you have no free time left at all.

Suddenly you find yourself working more, without necessarily any significant increase in your standard of living.

You end up neglecting your family, your health, and your spiritual and personal growth simply because you do not have time.

Only after juggling many balls do you realize that some are more important than others.

You may have plenty of money but very little time to enjoy it with your family, poor health and a dry spiritual life.

On the other hand, you may have all the other areas worked out but if you are always short of money, it is only a matter of time before you start spending most of your time chasing it.

The elusive search for work life balance

Ideally this is a state in which you have enough money to keep you from worrying about it, and enough time to deal with your other priorities such as family, your health and your spiritual life.

Having a fixed income is very risky, and is usually a consequence of being employed.

However, most employees tend to have more time than entrepreneurs or business owners, although they live in the constant fear of losing their jobs and retiring with no money to support themselves.

To the other extreme, the income potential of the entrepreneur is limitless, but the time pressure can be extremely intense, given that the work day ends when the work is complete (which rarely happens).

Quality time cannot be commanded at will. You have to spend a lot of time with your loved ones (quantity) to be able to create a threshold of quality.

This may call for scripting or scheduling your daily activities in a way that allows you to pursue all your interests within the limited time available.

Living a balanced life?

The key to work life balance lies in establishing your priorities and responsibilities without neglecting your financial needs. All these are bound to change at different stages in your life, thereby forcing you to chase moving targets.

You can then craft an appropriate strategy that will allow you to live your life according to what is important to you.

That may sound straight forward and obvious but few of us ever really bother to list what is important to us in life and that is why it usually takes a specific incident for us to realize which areas of our lives we have neglected.

Unfortunately, the most likely outcome of struggling to achieve a rigid form of work life balance is mediocrity with little if any achievement at all, given that success in any area of life requires serious commitment.