The phrase ‘work/ life balance’ wasn’t in use until the 1970s. So it wasn’t a rallying call for the downtrodden masses Dickens and Orwell wrote about. And it wasn’t brought in to plead the cause of the last remaining coal miners; it was a weapon that was deployed, not on behalf of downtrodden manual labourers, but for a privileged category of people who had chosen careers that ended up hijacking their lives.
It’s time we recognised this phrase was out of date before it was coined. And a bit of honesty will shine a more constructive light on this subject.
We talk about our offices as the ‘coalface’. My grandfather would not have been amused. Our offices are well lit. In Winter, they’re warm; and we’ve even got used to them being cool in Summer. Those auditors who inhabit dimly lit basements are the exception that proves the rule.
What do we spend our time at work actually doing; and is it all so bad? Again, I suggest we’re fortunate. We aren’t repeating conveyor-belt tasks through a mind-numb ‘shift’. In the commercial world, we’re interacting with colleagues and clients, we’re solving problems and we’re communicating. What aspects of your job do you admit you enjoy? You might even allow yourself a smile: maybe the person who chose that career for you didn’t go so far wrong after all?
So we start to see a bit of blurring between ‘work’ (what we get paid for) and ‘life’ (the bits we’re meant to enjoy). We’re not always quick to admit, even to ourselves, that we like some of what we do at our ‘coalface’. Colleagues who are fathers with very young children have told me for years that they get into the office early because, that way, they can get more done. Too right! Especially when they can leave someone else at home to do all that early morning childcare. I suggest that’s a clear example of a choice being made, where ‘work’ isn’t a pit of toil but, instead, it represents the more comfortable option.
Beyond that example, I challenge you to conduct a test at random points in your working day. The plain question to ask yourself is ‘Am I (honestly) enjoying this?’. You don’t have to share your answers with anyone. In fact it might be a bit strange if you did. Choose your own words to describe how you feel, but what you’ll find is that it varies. And if you’re honest, you’ll accept that parts of your job are actually how you’d choose to spend your time even if you had a choice…which, of course, you do!
Recognising the good bits helps us to see we’re not just labouring away under a dark cloud of ‘work’. The chances are there are strands of light and shade in our work time, not so very different from that ‘life’ time for which we’re not getting paid. If we really can’t come up with anything good about our job, we can either focus on who’s to blame (but what’s the point of beating ourselves up?), or we can take responsibility for making our role more fulfilling, or for finding a different role that is.
Instead of pointing an accusing finger at that evil ‘work’, we might step back, better to see the bigger picture, and take responsibility for aligning how we spend the whole of our time (whether paid or not) with our values and with what interests us.
(Thank you to Claudia Danser, Ann Orton and Emilio Galli-Zugaro for the discussion, and to The London Shell Company for the fish.)