May 6, 2010
The Whole is Greater than the Parts
I’ve been thinking a lot about work-life balance recently. Or, more accurately, work-family-health-money-friendship-education balance.
Life has so many different parts to it, and it’s easy to let one of those parts become your sole focus. You work a great career, but let your health and personal life decline. You have a great social life, but your finances suck and your job is a soul sucker. You work out every day and eat optimum food, but you have few friends. And so on.
- Robert Fulghum
When our lives are balanced, we are happier, healthier, and emotionally stable. Work we enjoy, a solid friendship group, a healthy body and mind, enough money left over at the end of the month. These things – each one manageable on their own – add up to a sense of happiness, fulfillment and flow that far outweighs the benefits of focusing on one area.
If you’ve ever hiked in a group, or done some kind of team-based activity you will know that you are only as strong as your weakest person. They dictate the pace.
Equally, your life is only as good as it’s weakest part. If you focus on your social life to the exclusion of your financial well-being, you’ll wind up broke and miserable. If your career prevents you from forming good friendships, then you’ll be lonely and miserable.
Keeping everything balanced is harder than it seems. For myself, I frequently focus over much on work and money. Meanwhile my health suffers and my friendships founder. In the last year or so I’ve been making huge strides in correcting that – joining a local weekly yoga class, eating better, spending time on my garden, and very recently making a commitment to start running three times a week. I haven’t found myself any less productive either – instead of dawdling over web-design and checking my emails and facebook every five minutes I now focus and produce as much as I can – knowing that I only have an hour or two hours before I have to move on to something else.
It is difficult. Anyone who has to work a standard work-week will know that fitting everything else in around that 8-9 hour chunk is hard-work! But balance is the key to a happy life.
It’s much easier to keep everything balanced if you keep everything simple. Instead of creating a complex work-out scheme that targets each muscle group in turn, or eating an unusual and restrictive diet, just build exercise into your daily routine, and eat whole natural foods that you enjoy. Instead of having an intricate system for organising your projects and to-do list, just pick the three things that are most important and do them. Instead of insisting that ‘family time’ has to be an expensive all-day trip out to a theme-park or educational show, just spend an hour or two playing with your kids.
What area of your life are you ignoring? What’s the worst that could happen if you changed your focus for a while?
That’s some great advice, and I’m currently in the process of trying to hit that balance. I have it done pretty well so far on most things, but I still need to fit my finances and job into the picture a little bit better. I imagine that will cause me to have to do a lot of rebalancing, but it should be manageable.
I think managing money and a job is the most challenging element to balance in the western culture. It very much takes rejecting a lot of what we learn growing up I think!