Stop Chasing Work-Life Balance - Do This Instead

"There's no such thing as work-life balance. There are work-life choices, and you make them, and they have consequences."

That’s a quote by former GE CEO, Jack Welch.

This week’s episode is about finding balance in our lives. 

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Script | 382

Hello, and welcome to episode 382 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. 

It’s always fascinated me how so many people see the attainment of a “work-life balance” as their goal in life. Yet, that balance is easily achieved if you know what is important to you, are clear about your core work activities, and take control of your calendar. 

I’m reading Dominic Sandbrook’s brilliant book State of Emergency: The Way We Were, Britain 1970 to 1974. 

In Britain in the early 1970s, the economy was in dire straits. The labour unions were fighting the employers and the government, inflation was rising uncontrollably and unemployment was becoming a serious problem. Nothing the government tried worked and often made things worse. 

Yet, despite all these travails, people got on with their lives. They went to work, came home had dinner with their families or dropped into the pub to meet up with friends. At weekends kids went out to the cinema, or hung out on the high street with their friends.

Parents would potter around their gardens or attempt DIY projects at home. 

Balance was a given. Work happened at work. Home life happened at home. There were clear boundaries. 

Today, it’s easy to find people being nostalgic for those halcyon days, yet they weren’t all great. There were frequent power cuts (power outages), droughts, and the incessant strikes meant often people couldn’t get to work, or their workplace was closed because of the strikes. 

Having a work life balance shouldn’t be a goal. It should be the way you life your life. There’s a time for work, and a time for your hobbies and family. Not in a strict sense, but in a flexible way. 

This week’s question is about ho to achieve that with the minimal amount of effort and fuss. 

So, to get into the how, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.

This week’s question comes from Isabelle. Isabelle asks, Hi Carl, I’m having a lot of trouble trying to balance my professional and personal life. I never seem to have time to meet my friends, and often skip going to the gym because I have to finish my work late in the evenings. What do you recommend someone do to regain some work/life balance? 

Hi Isabelle. Thank you for your question.

One of the most effective ways to start this is to create what I call a “perfect” week calendar. This is where you create a new blank calendar and sketch out what you would like time for each week.

Begin with your personal life. How many times do you want to go to the gym, how much sleep do you want each night, and how much time you want to spend with family and friends? 

Add these to your calendar.

Then sketch out how you would like to divide up your work time. How many meetings per week, how much time can you spend on admin and communications each day and time for doing deeper, focused work. 

Once you have done this, you will get to see if what you want time for each week is realistic. I’ve found most people who do this exercise discover that they are trying to do the impossible. 

You only have 168 hours a week. And you do not have to do everything you want to do in those 168 hours. 

Before coming to Korea, I used to go to watch Leeds Rhinos Rugby League team every home game. In those days, those games were usually held on a Friday night. 

This meant, every other Friday, I’d make sure I left work on time, got home, changed, had a quick dinner, then went to pick up my friends and off we went. 

After the game we’d call into the local pub for a few beers before going home. 

During the season, we made it a non-negotiable event. It would have been unheard of for any of us to miss a Friday night game. 

If I had urgent work to finish, I would rather go back into the office on Saturday morning to finish it off than miss a game. 

That was the mindset. Those games and meeting up with friends were non-negotiable. 

And that is the first lesson here. If there is something you want to do, then make it non-negotiable. 

Of all the productivity and time management tools available, the only one that will tell you if you have time to do something is your calendar. 

Task managers and notes apps can collect a lot of stuff. Ideas, things to do, future projects, meeting notes. The list is infinite.

Yet, the time you have is not infinite. It’s limited. Each day has 24 hours, each week has 168 hours. 

Part of the reason many feel there is no balance in their lives is they’ve allowed task managers to become their primary time management tool. 

If you look at your task manager, it’s just a list of things you either have to do or would like to do. There’s no time frame. Some of the things on there will be important and time sensitive. However, a lot won’t be. And when you scroll through the list, all you see are things to do. 

It numbs the mind and makes you feel you have no time to rest.

The difference between today and the 1970s is what we are prioritising. 

Because in the 1970s the only productivity or time management tools we had were desk or pocket diaries and notebooks, the only tool we looked at when asked to do something was our diaries. 

This meant we would instantly see a conflict and would be able to say “No, sorry I cannot do that on that day”. 

Today, when we are asked to do something we add to our task manager-after all, it’s easier to add it there than to open up our calendar app, and look at what we are committed to. 

If you have on your calendar a regular aerobics class on a Tuesday at 6:00 p.m. And you’re asked to attend a meeting at 4:30 p.m. You’d more likely say you cannot attend that meeting if all you had is your calendar to look at. 

Today, we don’t do that. We say “yes, okay” then later realise we’’ll struggle to get to our class. 

I remember when I was at university, my finish time at work was 5:30 p.m. and my lectures began at 6:00 p.m. There was no way I would accept a meeting request on a Tuesday or Thursday after 3:30 p.m. 

It took me twenty minutes to get to my university from the office. 

Attending university was a non-negotiable for me. Meetings with colleagues could be arranged either earlier in the day or the next. 

This is why you cannot afford to leave things to chance if you want to bring balance into your life. If something is important to you, you need to be intentional about it. 

But there’s another important consideration and that is flexibility. Balance is about being flexible. 

Most nights, I finish my coaching calls around 11:00 p.m. Now it would be very tempting for me to quit and flop down in front of the TV and mindlessly watch something. Yet, reading real books is something I get a great deal of pleasure from. So, before I consider turning on the TV, I grab my book, go through to the living room and read for twenty minutes or so. 

It’s wonderfully relaxing—much more so than trying to find something to watch TV. 

Yet, if there is something I do want to watch on TV, I’ll skip the book and watch the TV show. 

There are sometimes when for one reason or another, I have not cleared my actionable email. If all I have is the hour after my calls finish to do it, then I’ll spend thirty minutes or so clearing as many emails as I can. 

Doing my email late is far better than having to try and find additional time the next day. 

On Wednesday this week, my wife asked me if I would go with her and her parents on a little trip to the mountains that afternoon. 

I had not planned for it, but said if I could have the morning to record my YouTube videos and get my Learning Note out, I would love to go. 

I knew I would have to edit the videos when I got back that evening, but spending time with my family was important. So, that’s what I did. 

We had a lovely afternoon in the mountains and I got my videos edited. 

As I sat down to read my book on Wednesday night, I had a little smile on my face because the day had been fantastic, and all my important work had been done. 

Creating balance in life is not about adding more and more stuff to do in a task manager. It’s about how you are allocating your time each day. 

What is important to you? That’s what goes on your calendar. There’s a time when you can sit down at your desk and do work. But there’s also time when you need to stop, relax and spend time with the people you care about, or do your exercise, play with your kids or walk your dog. 

Everything you want to do requires time. Yet, time is the one thing in your life that is limited. 

You can accept thousands of tasks, and have hundreds of ideas to do things but none of those will happen if you do not have the time to do them. 

That’s why I advocate managing your work by when you will do it, rather than managing endless lists of tasks. When you focus more on your available time to do stuff, you begin eliminating more of the low-value stuff and begin to appreciate your time more. 

There are thousands of things you could do, perhaps would like to do someday. None of that matters today. What matters today is you get the important things done. And choosing those are is entirely within your power. 

Yes, you can go to the gym, you can also have a movie night with your friends or family. They are important (think family and relationships and health and fitness areas of focus). 

Yet, if you have an important interview tomorrow and feel a couple of hours this evening spent preparing would be a better use of your time, then ask if you can postpone the movie night to tomorrow. 

Tonight is not zero hour. You can move things around to better fit with your priorities for today. 

And that neatly brings us back to the daily and weekly planning. 

Weekly planning is about the big picture. The big things you want to get accomplished. If you decide that you will go to the gym three times this week, schedule it. 

If you see that a good use of your time would be to work on that big project where the deadline is approaching, schedule time for working on it. 

The daily planning is about making the necessary adjustments to deal with the things that you were unaware of when you did the weekly planning. The client with a crisis, your disorganised boss that forgot to tell you about her impending deadline, or your son coming down with a heavy cold. 

It all starts and ends with your calendar. That worked perfectly well for hundreds of years, it still works today. 

Task managers and notes apps support you. Your calendar is where you get to see what you’re committed to and tells you if you have time to take on more, or whether taking a few days break would be more beneficial for you. 

I hope that helps, Isabelle. Thank you again for sending in your question. 

And thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.