Sunday, May 30, 2021

Creating an Integrated Life Where Work Adds to Life

 

 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

 Both my brother and I have applied the lessons we learned from that integration of work and life to our lives in ways that made our lives much more meaningful and rewarding.