Response to: What Does Work/Life Balance Mean to You?
My father
did a great job with work/life balance by integrating work with life to
an extent that most people do not. Instead of the typical what I do for
work requires sacrificing "life" he built a life where what he did for
work enhanced life. He was a professor and worked for a year in London a
year in Singapore and a year in Nigeria. The life experiences that
having work and excelling at work to the extent that he could arrange
such options provide a much richer life than if he maximized life by
restricting his effort in work. We had experiences that are invaluable
and extraordinary.
I realize doing this to the extent he did is
very difficult. But growing up with it I learned that the idea that you
could design the whole life (including everything) to maximize life.
And that it may well be that extra effort at work rather than detracting
from the rest of life enhances it. For me the key is to focus on
maximizing the whole and within that realizing sometimes there are
tradeoff (essentially a zero sum game) but there may well be times when
you can design the system of your life to find win win solutions.
I wrote about this on my blog The Aim Should be the Best Life – Not Work v. Life Balance
