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Is Work/Life Balance Still a Thing? · Humanity Working

• 0:10
  SPEAKER_02: So we still toss around work-life balance, but does that phrase even describe reality anymore, Paul?
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_00: You know, uh I don't think so.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_00: The term work-life balance um really emerged actually in the 70s, 80s, uh, something along those lines.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_00: And it really came uh from the idea that our work-lives had become out of balance and needed to be put back into balance.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_00: And it's obviously for most people that weren't working in the 70s and 80s, which is, you know, most people in the workforce now, um, those people, um the idea of work itself not being tied to a calendar was very, very new.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_00: So you kind of have this emergence of office jobs and so on, where there was where there was no logical start point and end point to work.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_00: Think about it like you're you're working in a factory or even an old school office, you would have had, you know, you work from this period to this period, this is your shift, and when your shift is done, you leave, and your success was measured by the amount of stuff you got done while you were there.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_00: So you get into the 70s and 80s, and now you're seeing the emergence of more types of jobs uh whereby people are um you could flex, you could theoretically flex the amount of uh the work you were doing, and you could stay late at the office.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_00: And of course, as that's happening, um people's lives started to get out of balance, right?
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_00: And um and unsurprisingly, there was a clear problem, the lives getting out of balance, and here's the critical thing, a clear solution, right?
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_00: The clear solution was leave the office early.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_00: Your life's out of balance, leave the office early, you put your uh life back into balance.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_00: Why?
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_00: Because the work you were doing was defined by the place you were doing it.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_00: Now we move into this new world and that connection is no longer there, right?
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_00: We've got rid of that natural constraint, and we can do work from anywhere at any time.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_00: And so you don't solve the problem by simply uh uh by simply leaving work early.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, I kind of said maybe or or no when you said is it does it really apply anymore?
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_00: Um I I think the idea of being balanced is something that does apply, but the old school concept of work-life balance probably doesn't anymore.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I mean, I don't know if people could even tell if they're in balance in in this in in this space.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_02: So you almost have to you have to define it very clearly for yourself what you mean to balance it.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_02: Is it is it scales of working this many hours versus you know doing nothing versus doing something you enjoy, like where's the balances go, plus the everyday tasks of life, you know?
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, well, f well, funny enough, Matt.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_00: Um what we found in in our work is that it's often the people that are separate from you but close to you are the people that know.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_00: So we did something, an experiment fairly early on in our in the existence of our company, whereby we were asking a set of questions of people in the workplace, and then with their permission, we were asking the loved ones of those people the same set of questions.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_00: And the challenge with trying to figure out whether you're you yourself are in balance or not is that in this new world, that's very connected to your emotional state.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_00: So, in other words, if you're like spending a lot of time at the office but really enjoying it, you're gonna feel more in balance.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_00: And if you're spending a lot of time at the office but not enjoying it, then you're gonna feel out of balance, right?
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_00: But the people that are connected to you don't have that uh same perspective.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_00: And so we found quite a lot of situations whereby um you had people that said, Yeah, yeah, I'm in balance, and then you ask their loved ones and they're like, heck no, they're not in balance.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_00: And so if you're actually looking to judge whether your imbalance in some way linked to that kind of like old school definition of it, um, then asking the people around you is a much better way of figuring it out than trying to figure it out yourself, which is going to be subject to all those different kinds of biases.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, because quote unquote working fewer hours isn't necessarily the fix, or removing yourself from the building where work happens isn't the fix.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_02: And maybe that was never the fix for people that were sort of workaholics that took work home with them anyway.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_02: You know, it was about their presence, their energy, maybe their their attention to what they were doing, because you could be not at the office, but also really not at home either.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_00: Well, well, yeah.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_00: Um it's really interesting you should mention that because then that same set of experiments that we did, we looked to that at that one question, were people in balance or out of balance?
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_00: But then we went a little bit further.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and we were asking those people as to, you know, what's most in what's most important to you?
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_00: So the people that are connected to the people doing the work, what's most uh what's most important to you?
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_00: And what we were expecting, uh it turned out very wrongly, was some kind of thing that was connected to that old school view, like, oh, I need to see more of them.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_00: And in reality, what we saw was not about quantity, it was all about quality.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and so the idea here was that peep, yes, people were spending less time around their loved ones, but not only that, they were disengaged or disconnected to the loved ones when they when they were with them.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_00: So let's say you got half an hour of time with your spouse or your kids, are you fully engaged in that half hour that you have with them?
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_00: And so this is actually pointing a little bit to where the where the solution really lies here, right?
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_00: So, yes, of course, and you should um try to figure out ways of working that are efficient and effective to give you sufficient time to do the to do the other things you want to do.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_00: But at least as important or more important when it comes to this concept specifically, is about you know, putting the phone aside, mentally trying to disconnect from your work for the half hour, for the three-quarters of an hour.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_00: And so when we're working with people on this, we we focus a lot more on that.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_00: It's like, how are you going to make sure that the period of time that you're devoting to the other spaces in your life are really, really counting and you're present in the moment?
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_02: Interesting.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_02: So so what other than its monopoly on our time by hours, simply by the nature of how the 40-hour work week is structured, whatever the case may be, what's special about the work that makes it dominate everything else?
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_02: Like how can you stop it from taking over, even if you like it?
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, you know, or especially if you like it.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_02: Because because now you're not so resistant to having it take over your non-working hours, so to speak.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_00: Well, it's funny, you've hit uh you've hit on a couple of things there, right?
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_00: So there's two causes, specific causes that we've identified that could cause work to basically take over everything.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_00: The first is um is sort of the peril of loving your work.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_00: And um and this is not all of us, in fact, in most uh most studies we you know, you see 30% engagement at work.
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_00: The people that are highly engaged to the point where it is really kind of like emotionally taking over what they do, where they can't wait to be back at work to do the next piece, that's lower still.
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_00: That's like 10%, right?
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_00: So if you've got like 10% of the population, right, they love their work so much that they can't imagine them doing uh them doing anything else.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_00: And on the surface, that sounds really great.
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_00: But actually, in practice, over time, that itself can lead to burnout because you don't have the natural normal breaks and barriers that you know that would cause you to step away from it.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_00: And so you can go very rapidly from I love this, I love this, I love this, to oh my gosh, I hate this, right?
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_00: So um you see that in sports sometimes, you know, where athletes rapidly become burned out.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_00: You see it in music, you see it in these things that are you know sort of uh driven by passion.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_00: So that can be a challenge.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_00: And the way in which you typically address that challenge is that you have to be careful to literally schedule and kind of force time away from it, and be very, very mindful of the fact that you need to take time away from it in order to retain the love, to retain that the love you have from it.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, we talk about sports science all the time.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_00: Sports teams do this a great deal, right?
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_00: So, as in, you know, when you take the break, you're not at you're not at the ground, you're not doing X or Y or Z, you are deliberately away, and that's designed to keep your desire for it when you get back to it.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_00: Um The other thing which is, I think, uh probably um the least is important for everybody else as to why it can become dominant, is nothing to do with that, actually.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_00: And it's all to do with measurements, right?
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_00: So if you think about all of the different aspects of your life, all of the things that you're balancing and you're juggling, there's really only one of those things where you're actively tracked and measured and hound accountable for the time and the effort that you put into it, right?
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_00: In most cases, you're not stepping into a one-on-one with your spouse or your kids, where you're, you know, you're where you're reporting on the progress that you've had over the uh over the last month or the KPIs.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and in most cases, uh, your wife or your kids are only intervening when things have gone horribly wrong, right?
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_00: And so up until that point, it's much more like, yeah, we figure it out as we go along, you know, all of this kind of stuff.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_00: And so what that means is that you've got, you know, let's say there's four or five different things that you're looking to looking to accomplish, um, or four or five spaces in your life that you want to pay attention to.
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_00: Um, sometimes it can be even fewer than that.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_00: There's your work, there's personal development, there's the relationships that um that you have with other people, there are personal interests potentially that you have, and there's your health and things like that.
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_00: So you're trying to make sure that you're juggling all of these things.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_00: Um, try to insert some kind of like equivalent accountability measure associated with those other things, right?
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_00: Because accountability is almost always going to be there in the workplace unless you're working for yourself or you're independently wealthy.
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_00: Try to give yourself some measure of accountability associated with those other things as well.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_00: And that will kind of even the playing field.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_00: But that's really why.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_00: It's it's like you're being held accountable for this one part and you're not being held accountable in the same way for the other, uh, for the other parts.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_02: Huh.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_02: Interesting.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, you know, Gen Z kind of talks about balance differently.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_02: So, like, are they redefining this or reacting to the same pressures in a new way or a different way than maybe traditionally are.
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_00: A little bit.
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_00: Um, we discover quite a bit about this when we we do a we have a program, we call it Early in Career Durable Skills, but it's basically um it's targeted exclusively at early in career professionals and how they go about um making sure that they have nailed all the intangibles a really good word.
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_00: And so when we were building that, we were talking uh and studying obviously a lot of this.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_00: And what we found is that that the term boundaries or setting boundaries is is really, really embedded in the in the younger generation.
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_00: And there's there's nothing wrong with that at all, actually, right?
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's great, it's great to have boundaries across the different part of your lives.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_00: And as you do, that can help you sort of define these different spaces really, really well.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_00: But I think the important part here is that that only speaks to um that only speaks to the to one aspect of this, right?
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_00: It does not speak to the aspect of providing your full and dedicated attention to those different parts of your life when you're in them.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_00: Um and so I think that first part, the sort of like, this is the other part of my life, not my work, that's great that they've um that they've imposed structure.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_00: Many of them have imposed structure where structure had previously disappeared.
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_00: That's important.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_00: It's a skill that that we work on with people, right?
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_00: In the the workplace in general has become more unstructured and more ambiguous.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_00: So it's on you to reinsert that structure.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_00: Well, let's talk about boundaries, is is uh a good part of that.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_00: The second piece is ensuring the quality of each of those uh of each of those areas within which you're operating, so that so that as you're in a dedicated space that is defined by that bound uh by those boundaries, you're really paying attention to it.
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_00: I think that area is still something that that um earlier in career professionals can really benefit from working on.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_02: Good stuff.
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_02: It always comes back to presence and just being here now in it.
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_02: Sure does.
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_02: All right.
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_02: Till next time.
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_02: Thanks, Paul.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_00: All right, cheers, Matt.
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_02: Humanity Working is produced and edited for Billion Minds by Matt Neal.
• 14:37
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• 14:41
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• 14:43
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