Work/Life Balance - And Why It's Impossible To Achieve

Balance between work and life is truly a beautiful concept! The idea that work never gets in the way of your life, your family and your personal time and that you can accomplish both in a perfect balance is appealing! However, after being through college and currently my career with what many people consider pretty good time-management skills, I can tell you for sure that this utopian concept does not exist. At least, not in the way you think.

Now, I am not here defending the idea that you should ditch your personal life, friends and beloved ones and work your ass off, covering inhuman hours in a single week. That would be hypocritical of me, a person that usually starts my working day at the usual 9am-10am and clocks out at the end of the day, doing something else unrelated afterwards. However, I've seen close friends and people within my social circle with a distorted understanding of what a balance between work and life is. An understanding that actually makes your life more stressful and anxiety-inducing than if you didn't worry about the balance at all.

When balance actually creates stress

The ideal, perfectly balanced day I observe on some of my acquaintances looks something like waking up earlier than the birds, having a delicious, well-served breakfast full of healthy and nutritious food, followed by a vigorous workout and finishing it all just in time to take a quick shower before starting their very productive full-time, 8-hour long work day without a single second of overtime. That is proceeded with exactly 1 hour and a half of reading, and then by a very robust feast for dinner cooked by their Michelin star level hands. After that, they spend a top-quality time with their spouses for the rest of the night until the time comes to perform the final hygiene rituals of the day and going to bed to fall sleep without any struggles at 10:30pm.

Perfectly balanced! Perfectly planned! Everything has its time, and it's absolutely impossible and stressful to even attempt reaching.

To be fair, just writing that fantastical schedule has made me hyperventilate. Nobody in this universe is capable of doing all that, and if in their "A day in the life of an animator" video makes it seem like that's their routine, they are absolutely lying to you.

Think with me: everything is so tightly scheduled that there is no flexibility for when you want, for example, to go out with some friends you don't see in a while. How could you? It's booked on the same time of your reading routine, you just can't disrupt your perfectly balanced schedule like that!

The balance between work and life is supposed to be something helpful that makes your life more enjoyable and less likely to bring you to exhaustion. However, the way this concept is often sold online leads to even more stress and anxiety because everybody understands that it's something that requires hard work to achieve. Don't you work hard enough during the day with your professional or academic responsibilities?

I was reading a little bit about it online and I came across several articles that expressed something that I heavily agree with. The common mistake people make is believing that work life balance is an achievement. Something that you have to put in the hours and effort to conquer. That defeats the exact purpose of what it is trying to achieve.

Look, absolutely nothing is perfect in life. Like the great millennial philosopher Duke Nukem said: "Shit happens!". There needs to be a level of flexibility to your daily, weekly, monthly routine. Unexpected events happen, sometimes you need to go out to get some issues figured out, you need to have fun and enjoy some time with some friends, you need to travel every now and then. You also need to have some flexibility in case you're needed at work, to put a little bit of extra hours to get something done, to help out a co-worker, which leads me to my next point.

What balance truly is

I remember listening to one episode of the Proko's podcast "Draftsmen" and somebody asked Stan how to balance work and life. His answer:

"I think the answer to this is obvious: you don't!" - or something like that.

Your life is and always will be unbalanced, because shit happens and will keep happening until the very last day you're in this world. However, life is never unbalanced in the same way for too long, it always favours one side.

Sometimes your life is unbalanced towards work, maybe because there are some tasks that have to be finished and require some overtime from you. Other times, your life can be unbalanced towards personal time, as you could have saved up some money to take a break in between contracts, perhaps to go on a long trip. There are also times where your work/life balance is near the 50-50, although it never really reaches this perfect percentage, but there might be some pending chores rank higher in the hierarchy then, let's say, video game night.

Work/life balance is the balance of the unbalanced. It's a compensation for the times when your priorities were tilting too hard on one end of the scale. You follow an intensive work week with a more relaxing one. If your weekend was all about cleaning the house, the next one can be all about watching TV. If you want to grow on your career, you spend a good chunk of your time improving your skills. Then, once you have established yourself professionally, you shift the balance towards your family, and so on.

Truth is, your life is almost never perfectly balanced. You most likely will not be able to work out, be productive at work, sexually active and spend quality time with your spouse, eat healthy and sleep 8 hours a day for most of your life, and the day you do will be proof on why it's impossible to keep that pace every day. It's exhausting!

Final Thoughts

A perfect, idealized balance between work and life is an impossible achievement that will just generate more stress and anxiety, completely defeating the purpose of the concept in the first place. In fact, seeing this as an achievement is a big mistake.

While you shouldn't be overworked all the time, your career and your personal life will be constantly unbalanced, just in different ratios. Sometimes you will have to prioritize your work and sacrifice a bit of your personal time. Other times the pointer is more in favour of your time outside of the office. The true work/life balance is compensating these moments of unbalance.

Having a schedule is important, as well as attempting to stick to it. Just accept that most of the time you will not follow it 100%, and that's honestly fine! Flexibility is important so you can accomodate events that are not usually part of a routine, such as meeting an old friend after work during the week, going out for drinks with your co-workers, or even to solve unexpected issues that arised in your life (because they come up all the time).

Don't get obsessed with it! Nobody is perfect, neither are you, so don't even try it. Just observe yourself and figure out the schedule that best fits you. If you cannot wake up super early (me) like some coaches out there wants you to believe that you should, arrange your days around that. Yeah, you don't have to wake up 4am everyday! I, for example, cannot operate anytime earlier than 8:30am.

Lastly, just remember that about everything in life has a layer of complexity. Nothing is simple, at least not completely. There are always variables that can make something either beneficial or harmful to you. If you find a rule, concept, idea, opinion or whatever it is that is just way too simple, be skeptical! Things are more complicated than they seem.

Take care!