Forget balance, I prefer integration. My blended work life.
Thirty years ago, when my Dad sat at his desk at a bank HQ in London, he was at work. When he was at home, he was off work. Black and white. For my parents’ generation ‘work’ was a place you went to, not something you did.
That’s not the world we live in anymore. And for the last few months - in what’s been a gigantic global experiment in radically and rapidly redesigning our work lives - most employees in organisations (including people at my Dad’s former bank) have much more flexible work lives.
Let me paint a picture of a ‘day at work’ from last week.
I started my Tuesday walking the dog with my wife. By 9am I was sitting in the window at one of my neighbourhood coffee shops. The coffee is good, it’s busy, it’s noisy and that’s how I like to start - getting into some strategic planning for the projects I’ve got on. 40 minutes later I was back at my home studio for a couple of online meetings. My phone pinged at 10:50 with a reminder of my next appointment: to go down to the beach at the bottom of my road for a swim. Some friends were there so we had a chat. I had with me my notebook and some books to read through over lunch. The beach and the September sunshine (pictured above) really fuelled me, I had some great ideas down there. A quick second swim and it’s back for some work on my laptop sitting in the garden. Up to my studio for a call with the U.S. and more work. An early dinner with my wife in the garden after which I sent a few emails. At 7.15pm I was done for the day so we corralled the kids, called walkies to the dog and headed back down the coast for a beach walk with the five of us in the twilight.
It was a perfect kind of day.
Work and play all blended together. Not separated.
A quick search shows me there are 1,670,000,000 search results for the term ‘work life balance.’ Many column inches have been taken up with posts on the same subject. But I’m not into this so-called balance. I don’t want my work life in one clear segment and the rest of my life in another. It feels like a see-saw, where ‘work’ sits on one side and balances it out with ‘life’ on the other. Because in reality it doesn’t work (pardon the pun) like that for me. Work is life, life is often work. They kind of mesh together, and on one of those days like last Tuesday, it seems pretty ideal.
So the way I see it, it’s much more a work/life integration. I’ve been practising this way of being for twenty years. Integration was the concept at the heart of my 2008 book ‘Juggle! Rethink Work, Reclaim Your Life.’
When I was researching my book I went to Paris to meet Kevin Roberts, CEO Worldwide of Saatchi & Saatchi. He reaffirmed what I already felt - and this was twelve years ago:
“It all starts with my long held belief that work/life balance is an outdated concept. Oprah Winfrey has a similar approach, ‘Live your best life every day’. So when asked if we’ve got the work/life balance right, it's simply the wrong question. The right question is: how do you successfully integrate work, family, fun, community, and social commitment into one passionate day, week, month, year, life?”
Until very recently, the picture I painted of my Tuesday at work might have been the preserve of nomadic consultants and freelancers. But now, as there is more allowance for flexibility and people are unshackled from the desks, work life integration is there for many more of us.
If going for a lunchtime swim and picnic on the beach is going to supercharge you, who wouldn’t want to get down there and into the water? If the opportunity is there, you’d be crazy not to. It’s more than a want, it’s a need - a need to look after ourselves, a necessity to recharge our brain cells or a vital way of grabbing some non-desk-based space to think. It’s not a luxury, it’s essential to keep us functioning and firing on all cylinders.
We have to take charge of our work and our lives and make the choices that are right for us. It’s up to us how we spend our time, only we know what’s important to us. This is how we get the work/life integration right.
As my wife and I walked down our street to the beach on that ideal Tuesday, a neighbour passed in her car.
“Off to the beach?” she called out.
We nodded.
“It’s alright for some,” she continued, “some of us have got to work!!”
And of course I was at work. It’s just that sometimes I have a towel around my neck when I’m working...
