Work – Life Balance – Living A Mindful Life

“Before capitalism, most people did not work very long hours at all. The tempo of life was slow, even leisurely; the pace of work relaxed. Our ancestors may not have been rich, but they had an abundance of leisure. When capitalism raised their incomes, it also took away their time.”
Juliet Schor, author of “The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure”

I consider myself very fortunate to have been in the employ of a very caring company for the final 22 years of my career as a personal financial advisor. I felt listened to, supported, respected, and appreciated.

None of this, however, left me immune to the challenges of work-life balance. Despite already being a seasoned advisor at the time I joined the company in 1997, I struggled to keep up with the heavy workload.

As a result I found myself staying later than desired most weeknights and going back into the office on many a weekend.

After enduring a year of this with no end in sight, I realized that something had to change, because:

I was begrudging the extra time spent at the office. Time I would have preferred to have spent with my spouse or engaged in my favorite leisure activities was being curtailed to fit in more time at work.
My job satisfaction was waning, and this despite truly loving my advisory role.
Despite being a generally happy, easy-going individual, I found myself feeling bitter and humorless.

Of course, my story is hardly unique. Indeed, for most Canadians and much of the rest of the world, this has become the norm.

For example, in a comprehensive 2012 study of 25,000 working Canadians it was found that:

the typical employee works more than 50 hours per week, this representing an extra full day of work each week.
54% took work home with them to do in the evening and/or on weekends.
the typical employee spends an hour each non-work day checking work-related email.

And this pace is leisurely compared to work-life balance in the Chinese tech industry where ‘996’ work regimes are currently the norm, this being a start time of 9am, a finish time of 9pm, and six days a week spent at the office.

Of course, all of this extra time working comes with serious consequences.

The Hazards of Working Too Many Hours

Beyond job dissatisfaction and less time to devote to life’s many joys and passions, chronic overtime can have very serious physical and mental health implications:

Mental burnout.
Significantly-increased risk of developing cardiovascular disease.
Working long days leaves less time for sleep and can also impair sleep quality. Lack of sleep can result in reduced productivity, impaired judgment, increased irritability, increased risk of high blood pressure and other chronic diseases such as diabetes, a compromised immune system, increased risk of fatigue-induced accidents, increased risk of anxiety and depression, and weight gain.
Increased stress (with all of the hazards this entails).
Vision problems (typically from staring at a computer screen for too long).
Impaired cognitive performance.
Too much sitting at a desk increases the risk of back problems, cancer, heart disease (irrespective of maintaining an exercise regimen), chronic illnesses like high blood pressure and diabetes, dementia in later life, and varicose veins.

When Long Hours Don’t Impact Work-Life Balance

A distinction needs to be made between two categories of overtime:

The extra work we do because we want to.
The extra work we do because we feel we have to.

I personally toiled thousands of extra hours over my career delving into investment journals and creating my own financial planning tools, not because it was expected or because I felt obligated to do it or because it increased my income – I just found it fascinating and professionally rewarding. As a result, it wasn’t a burden to me and so not a work-life balance issue.

Of course, many willingly toil well beyond a 40-hour week for other reasons, such as:

They truly love what they do. Work is more akin to play than to work.
Their income is directly linked to hours worked and the extra money means more to them than extra leisure.
They have performance targets and believe that long hours will help them reach those targets and so enhance their annual bonus, again the extra money meaning more to them than extra leisure.
They believe that being seen working long hours enhances their status within the company – a ‘team player’ – perhaps leading to future promotions.
It’s an expected part of the job at their firm and they accepted this fact going in.
They have few outside interests so work is pretty much it for them.
Their family life is a disaster so it’s better being at work.

Therefore, willingly working long hours is not the problem, it’s the work we grudgingly feel we have to do that upsets the apple cart of work-life balance.

Why is There Always More Work to Do Than Time to Do It?

Before we get to this question, let me make it clear that this post assumes employee and managerial competency:

Well-trained, motivated staff who know how to do their jobs efficiently and have been provided the necessary tools to do it.
Competent managers who limit their roles primarily to providing clear guidance on expected results, removing any pointless roadblocks that impede achievement of those results, and then getting out of the way to let their people get on with it.

So, with these points taken as a given, what are some of the key reasons we never have enough time to complete all our assigned tasks?

Two are often cited: 1) Office productivity killers. 2) Unrealistic workloads.

Productivity Killers

Certainly the impairment of productivity is an important and widespread issue. Tragically, this often involves self-inflicted wounds that cumulatively conspire to decimate workplace productivity, such as:

Open-concept office noise and distractions.
Interruptions by colleagues.
Email diarrhea.
Meetings, meetings, meetings, …

Without doubt these do impede getting one’s actual work done in the time allotted, but are not responsible for poor work-life balance.

Unrealistic Workloads

In short, unrealistic workloads are inevitable.

Why so? Because organizations need to keep costs under control to ensure their survival. No company wants excess staff on its payroll, so efficiency dictates that head count always be kept just below what is actually required.

Simply put, if your competition can make the same product as you do at a lower cost by being more productive – doing more with less – then they could end up putting you out of business.

CEOs spend much of their time worrying about this very issue – how to marshal resources in the most efficient way to seize opportunities and maximize profit.

But it’s not just publicly-listed and other for-profit companies that are impacted. Even not-for-profit organizations face pressure to deliver value-for-money to clients, funding bodies, and donors.

In other words, where competition exists, survival of the fittest applies pressure on firms to do more with less.

On the other hand, in the absence of competition (e.g. unionized public sector positions) there is some evidence that employees tend to have better work-life balance, generally working to fixed schedules (and quitting times) and putting in less overtime than private sector employees. Anecdotal evidence, in the form of personal friends working in the Canadian public sector, supports this finding.

So, neither workload nor productivity impediments are to blame

What this means is that, where competition exists, even if we all suddenly became that much more productive, either head count would shrink or work demands would expand to fill the time saved – the problem of work-life balance would remain firmly intact.

My own experience corroborates this. I got my first full-time job back in 1980, a time when neither desk-top computers nor email yet existed, both unquestionably boons to productivity.

However, their widespread adoption (computers in the mid-80s and email in the early 90s) failed to banish work-life balance issues. Indeed, the term ‘work-life balance’ really didn’t make into the lexicon until the late 80s, making this a clear case of productivity-enhancers rendering the workplace more onerous, not less.

Smart phones are another case in point. Wonderful tools for productive communication and information access but with the insidious downside of being able to remain work-connected 24/7 and the implicit expectation that comes with this. Is it any surprise that, in its day, the once-popular Blackberry was only half-jokingly known as the “Crackberry” for its addictive powers.

And as for staff numbers adjusting to economic reality, I was a mining engineer at the time of the 1981 recession and a financial advisor at the time of the 2008 financial crisis. In both instances, as profit declined, staff were fired to bring costs back in line with revenues – but the workload didn’t decrease.

So, no, productivity issues are not at the root of the work-life balance issue and corporate survival ensures that workload will always exceed staff capacity to complete all of it.

Why Do We Grudgingly Work So Much?

So, faced with more work than can realistically be done in a normal work day, why do we feel compelled to try to get all our work done knowing it’s an impossible goal?

I believe there is only one reason – fear – both corporate and personal: corporations fear being competed out of business and individuals fear being competed out of a job.

The Work-Life Dilemma

Because of these fears, resolving the work-life balance issue is akin to resolving the nuclear arms issue – no company and no employee wants to be the first to cut back hours because they believe they will be put at a disadvantage.

It is for this reason that employers are conflicted when it comes to this issue: having their staff put in extra hours for no extra pay helps them do more for no extra cost, but not taking work-life balance seriously can make it hard to attract and retain quality employees.

Little surprise then that employers tend to send mixed messages, espousing work-life balance on one hand while generally turning a blind eye to its absence in practice.

But employees also feel conflicted, desperately wanting work-life balance but fearing they’ll be sacked if they try to make it happen.

Indeed, I witnessed this type of fear first-hand during the closing years of my career. Some of my colleagues, though putting in significant overtime, chose not to submit requests for validly-earned overtime pay for fear of being seen as the only one unable to keep up with the workload – no one wanted to be the first-mover.

So, What’s the Solution?

What, then, will it take to eliminate this scourge on working life?

Because of it’s near-global presence, it is clear that work-life balance is a societal issue, and such issues typically only get resolved if enough brave individuals begin to stand up for themselves and demand change.

Their example can quickly unleash a tidal wave of support when the issue they agitate against touches so many lives, as work-life balance does.

This is how brutal autocrats worldwide are toppled and decency brought back into blighted societies. And it is how common-place work-life balance will eventually be achieved: through individual effort snowballing into widespread cultural change.

And It’s Already Happening!

The good news is that some enlightened societies, like the European Union and the Scandinavian countries, have already decided that enough’s enough and so have imposed legislation to soften the impact of capitalism.

This is reflected in the list below that shows the average number of hours worked per year in 2021 by full-time employees in various countries:

2300 China
1970 South Korea
1790 U.S.A.
1690 Canada
1610 Japan
1520 Finland
1490 France
1440 Sweden
1360 Denmark
1350 Germany

Remarkably, as outlined in this article, despite already posting the lowest annual working hours among OECD countries, German companies are having to become even more beneficent toward their employees as cultural and demographic changes (i.e. a declining number of working-age people – a near-worldwide occurrence) increasingly shift bargaining power to employees and so push work-life balance high up the agenda of job-seekers.

Even China’s downtrodden tech workers are speaking up against their punishingly-long hours.

So, change can happen, but until then, it’s up to you to speak up for yourself.

It’s up to You, and You, and You, ….

Mr. Kai-Fu Lee (one of China’s best-known entrepreneurs and former President of Google China) recently revealed his lymphoma diagnosis in a message to his 50 million followers on Sina Weibo. But what has resonated far wider is his repudiation of the work-comes-first mentality that drives so many Chinese business people.

“It’s only now, when I’m suddenly faced with possibly losing 30 years of life, that I’ve been able to calm down and reconsider,” wrote the 52-year-old founder and CEO.

Excerpted from Todayonline magazine, 15 Sept 2013

Sadly, it often takes just such a tragic circumstance to get us to re-evaluate what’s truly important in our lives, wake up to the self-inflicted insanity we have brought upon ourselves, and regain balance.

But here’s the rub – we don’t need an excuse. If we can do it under tragic circumstances like this, we can do it any time we choose.

And therein lies the solution:

Work-life balance is a choice – our choice, our collective choice – but it all starts with You.

Thoughts on Achieving Work-Life Balance

Choosing to say ‘no’ to a chronic work-life imbalance, to actually get up the gumption to advise your employer that you’re no longer going to work the hours you have been, may sound scary.

But it shouldn’t be if dealt with mindfully, openly, honestly, realistically, and in the spirit of goodwill that usually exists between employee and employer (and if it doesn’t, you’re working for the wrong company).

So, if you’re ready to take concrete steps to regain work-life balance – and do your part to drive societal change – here are some things to consider:

Take charge

Only you know what work-life balance means to you and only you can make it happen. No one is going to come up to you and say, “Here, let me help you achieve work-life balance.”

Keep the End-Goal in Sight

As you negotiate your way toward work-life balance, always keep in mind what’s at stake – all the life-enhancing moments that collectively contribute to helping make your life great – all the things you will regret not having devoted more time to at life’s end. After all, what’s life all about? Work? Partly, of course, but there’s way more to life than work.

You’re likely worth way more to your employer than you think you are.

Assuming you’re a capable, self-starting, congenial, positive individual, replacing you comes with significant costs:

The cost of hiring your replacement.
The cost of bringing that person up to your level of knowledge and experience.
The cost in lost productivity and increased errors in the meantime.
The negative impact your termination has on morale and, hence, other potential departures.
The cost associated with the loss of your future higher productivity that would have resulted had you been retained, but this starting from your already high skill level that may be many years ahead of your replacement.
The financial cost of compensating you for termination.
The potential cost of making a hiring mistake and having to go back through the entire hiring process again, with yet more cost.

Your employer is espousing work-life balance. You’re simply following through on it.

Being a professional entails having open, honest conversations with your employer about what work-life balance means to you – what your boundaries are and what your commitments are.

This obviously is a very individual issue – your definition of work-life balance may be quite different from that of your colleagues, and that’s to be expected.

In the end it all comes down to give and take between you and your employer. They justifiably expect results and you justifiably expect a life beyond work. Almost assuredly there is common ground between you and your employer. And if there isn’t, then you still have a choice – find a better employer.

Happy employees are more productive employees

Your value to your employer increases if you’re happy at work because it’s been shown to enhance productivity. Accommodating work-life balance is a powerful means to impact employee happiness.

Of course, we’ve already covered the negative mental and physical harms of over-work, all of which impede productivity, so avoiding over-work benefits both staff and the company.

Companies with work-life balance can attract and retain better staff

Imagine you’re looking for a job and have narrowed your choice down to two otherwise identical employers. Without question, you are going to choose the one that has a reputation for treating its employees better – the one that actually cares about its people’s work-life balance.

Such a company has the luxury of being picky about who it hires and so can preferentially select superior workers who are more creative and productive.

Being more productive, the company need not compete head-to-head on compensation to remain competitive. It’s the uncaring company with the less productive staff that needs to offer more pay in order to try to compensate for the longer hours that would be needed to compete with the more productive company.

And if the caring company does match compensation (which it could given its higher productivity)? It’s easy enough to see how the uncaring company could enter a death spiral, unable to compete on productivity, working conditions, or compensation sufficiently high to offset those awful working conditions.

The good news on this front is that this is already starting to happen. Unlike us old Baby-Boomers, today’s younger workers are increasingly asking prospective employers about work-life balance, and opting for those companies that actually take it seriously.

Life is precious, short, and could end much sooner than anticipated. Do you really want to fritter away a big chunk of it toiling in misery?

We tend to live life as if we’re immortal, our eventual death an event that’s going to occur in some far-distant future. But we all know this isn’t reality. Even in my limited social sphere I can think of dozens of friends, relatives, former classmates, and former colleagues who died young.

I myself could have died on 24 March 2017 when I was involved in a serious head-on car accident. Had I been hit by a larger vehicle that day I seriously doubt I would be around to write these words.

It shouldn’t take a life-altering health scare or other tragedy to wake us up to the preciousness of life. Yes, work is a fulfilling and necessary part of our lives, but its importance truly needs to be kept in perspective. And only we can make the choice to ensure that it plays its fair role, but no extra. It’s all a matter of taking responsibility for our own lives.

Flexible work arrangements may make work more pleasant, but do not directly address the problem of grudgingly-worked long hours.

Take the increasingly popular flex-hours idea – giving staff the ability to come and go as they choose to better accommodate their lifestyle, provided they still put in at least the contracted amount of time.

This obviously is of no help resolving work-life balance if you’re still begrudging the number of hours you have to toil, even if they are put in flexibly.

Work-from-home is another trend gaining acceptance by employers (and materially boosted by the Covid-19 pandemic). But once again, if you simply replace long hours at the office with long hours at home, nothing has been accomplished (indeed, there is evidence that those opting to work from home actually put in even more hours than those working from the office).

What about equal time off in lieu of those grudgingly-worked extra hours? On the face of it, this sounds a fair trade because your total hours worked now mathematically fits your concept of work-life balance.

But there are two problems with this arrangement. First, it is almost never the case that the extra time off comes anywhere close to the extra time worked.

Second, even if it is a one-for-one swap, all those extra hours spent at the office mess up your life over an extended period of time whereas the extra time off is concentrated into a day or two.

For example, let’s say that work-life balance to you means going home at 5pm each night but the workload is such that you feel compelled to work to 6pm most days. So, over a two-week span let’s say you accumulate eight hours of grudging overtime. Then, in lieu of this, you get an extra day off.

Would this feel like a fair trade-off? Two weeks of misery, followed by an extra day off, followed by another two weeks of misery, reprieved by another extra day off? I don’t believe so.

On the day you retire, no one is going to remember or care about all those extra hours you grudgingly put in over the years.

All those years spent putting in extra time at work, depriving yourself of other pleasures, and what do you get? If you’re lucky, a party, a card, a gift or two, a smattering of applause, and then you’re gone; replaced and quickly forgotten. Does this sound like a trade-off you really want to make?

Setting clear boundaries and then sticking to them is essential

Work-life balance is not a one-size-fits-all concept. Just because your colleague Johnny (or, even worse, your boss) is willing to work crazy hours doesn’t mean it should suit everyone else, because we’re each different.

As a result, only you know your work-life boundaries. It is essential that you know these boundaries, be able to verbalize them to your employer, and then stick to them, because in their absence you will end up saying ‘yes’ to requests to which you should have said ‘no’.

And if a request isn’t actually a request but an order? Then you owe it to yourself – for the sake of truth, honesty, and reality – to advise your employer that taking on that new task necessarily means that others on your to-do list will either be delayed or, indeed, dropped entirely.

Achieving work-life balance requires realism. If your employer doesn’t wish to face up to reality, then it may be time to find another employer.

We already have boundaries – we just need to choose better ones

All of us eventually choose to stop working at some point each day, meaning we all have chosen boundaries; we’ve just settled on ones that don’t provide us with work-life balance.

So, bearing this in mind, choose a better boundary that does. You still won’t get all your work done regardless, but you’ll be a happier, healthier, more productive employee as a result.

And, as mentioned above, in the end, no one’s going to remember or care how much time you put in or how many widgets of production you contributed toward the welfare of humankind during your time on this earth. You’re way more important to you than to the collective – so keep this firmly in mind.

Setting work-life boundaries shows you to be a thoughtful professional

Were I a manager, I personally would be impressed by someone who had taken the time to be able to clearly verbalize the following:

Based on my strengths, here is how I see myself contributing to the betterment of this company.
Here is my plan to achieve the performance targets I’ve been assigned.
Here are the boundaries within which I plan to work in order to achieve work-life balance.

As a manager, I know I would appreciate having clearly-defined work parameters from each member of the team rather than possessing only a vague sense of each one’s expectations and plans.

If no one can keep up with the work, it’s not you, it’s the job

When we’re always behind at work we start to question our competency and have a tendency to feel that we’re the only one who can’t cut the mustard. But here’s the thing – if all those around you doing the same role are also struggling, then it’s not you, it’s the job.

You must be prepared to quit if work-life balance is unattainable

In the end, if you are unable to negotiate a suitable work-life balance with your employer, then you must either be prepared to quit and find another employer that is more accommodating or accept that your life is going to be less than you had hoped it would be – your choice.

Final Word

Living a mindful life is all about making wise choices. And making such choices necessitates facing up to reality – head on – and not shying away from situations we fear.

Given its prevalence, achieving work-life balance is clearly a fearful situation for just about everyone.

However, if dealt with openly, honestly, realistically, and with goodwill and calm confidence, I believe it to be within everyone’s reach.

So, time to do your part for this obviously much-needed societal change!

Warmest wishes,

Rob @ Living a Mindful Life

Choosing Work-Life Balance: My Own Story

At the outset of this post I referenced my own lack of work-life balance. Here is what I did to bring sanity back to my own job as a personal financial advisor:

I found that my days were scattered, doing whatever happened to hit my desk at any given moment; quickly responding to email, always answering the phone whenever it rang ……. In short, I was reacting to the job rather than being proactive. Of course, working in this manner is stressful because you feel like you’ve got no control – you’re always at the mercy of external events. So, to regain control, I made a list of my duties, prioritized them, estimated how much time each would require, and then built a fixed weekly schedule that blocked off specific times each day of the week to deal with my most important tasks.

In doing so I acknowledged and accepted that the less-important tasks may never get done – how could they if I could barely keep up with the highest-priority items? Achieving work-life balance means facing up to reality, and reality is that there’s always more work to do than time available, so if I was going to get home at a reasonable hour, something had to give.

I ran my plan by a senior executive to gain their approval, which was granted.

I stuck to the plan vociferously and faced whatever consequences arose, which proved to be near nil. Yes, my assistant initially had difficulty saying ‘no’ to clients who wanted to see me right away. However, she soon discovered that clients were more accommodating than she had imagined – after all, they too were busy professionals who understood the need to take control one’s schedule.

I began making more realistic promises to clients, pushing off fulfillment sufficiently far into the future to ensure I could get it done without having to put in overtime.

And, most importantly, at the end of a normal work day, I went home. Was all my work done? Of course not! But then, it never would be regardless of how late I stayed.

And the outcome? I was proud of the service I provided my clients and, with the exception of one target, all of my results proved excellent – client satisfaction, client retention, new-client acquisition, new investment deposits, new insurance policies issued, financial planning value delivered, etc.

And the one target I consistently failed at? Well, that was the one dictating how many clients I was expected to meet with each year; I met with far fewer than my employer wanted.

However, that particular target was incompatible with my new way of working and my goal of maintaining work-life balance.

Nonetheless, given my success on the many measures that actually contributed to the profitability of the company (which hitting a meetings-per-week target doesn’t), this proved more than a reasonable trade-off, for me and the company.

What my experience illustrates is that there’s almost always more than one way to achieve success. After all, we each have unique skills and experience, so a one-size-fits-all approach to most jobs rarely makes sense.

In the end, I was able to be successful, achieve work-life balance, regain job satisfaction, and maintain a level of professionalism that I was proud of.

Now, I include my story not because I believe it can be blindly applied to every job out there, because it clearly can’t. However, my point is that you almost assuredly have more control over your situation than you believe, so I truly hope you take whatever steps are necessary to achieve your own work-life balance.

Best wishes,