Finding the Perfect Work/Life Balance

A lot of modern work today is geared around the work/life balance– and never have we worked less than we do today. We have more leisure time than ever, so why are we obsessed with work/life balance?

It’s because life and work used to be so entwined that you wouldn’t have known where one stopped and the other started!

Whether you were an agrarian or other family business, work used to center around the home. The husband and wife worked as a team to prioritize everything because everything was important. Your time was dedicated to your home because that was where your money was earned.

With the industrial revolution, work became something you did somewhere else, and our lives started to bifurcate. We started to consider the time that we had at home as leisure time, and the time at work was when we did stuff of value.

This is why people now hire things done at their home if they can afford it, and why there’s this impression that if we’re doing household chores, making our house look better, or are the one that takes care of the home, then we’re “less than.” Because the home is not the place where the important things in life happen, it’s the place where I crash and play video games until I have to go to work again.

So when most people talk about work/life balance, they really mean is work/leisure balance. And we were never guaranteed leisure time. What we should be doing is making sure that we are rightly prioritizing all the work that we have to do. We plan the big trips and with those we can engage, but we invest more organization, time, planning, and prioritization in our work lives and let the other hours just disappear. Therefore, we find that work feels like it matters more, so we put more effort into it.

We should be thinking of work as a part of the whole of our lives– and planning that activity accordingly. We should value the time we have to do those household items (investing in our children, doing the chores, etc.) and treat them with more respect than the PowerPoint slides we create, burgers we flip, etc.