Continued Relevance

One of my coworkers picked up a magnetic desk sculpture – one with acrobats and bars, and on it is written “Work life.  Personal life.  Help your employees balance both.”

 

I’ve never liked that work life/home life delineation.  It reminds me of the old Roses are Red rhyme:

 

 

If we really have to balance, that implies that there are to conflicting sets of demands.  The “work” demands and the “home” demands.  If indeed they conflict, then the easiest way to balance them is to entirely segregate them.  Segregating in this manner only serves to decrease our effectiveness at, and passion for, all the things we do.  Think of a machine, created with unlimited capabilities but segmented into various pieces that do not share information.  Those pieces might be working on different things, but if the machine were capable of sharing information it might well figure out that the seemingly unrelated tasks are really one in the same!  Sharing that information leads to better results, and a byproduct of it is the reintegration of the segments.

There are lots of these schizophrenic situations including

 

I’m sure you can come up with your own pairings.

 

In reality, you and I may be all those and more at the same time.

 

So, the question isn’t how do you balance these but rather “How do you incorporate these?”.  You incorporate them by trusting that there is order to things, and that everything will get done at exactly the right time.  There are times where one part of you will need more attention – that’s fine.  Tight deadlines at work or the upcoming release of “Astroboy”, for example.  Those times will be balanced – golfing with co-workers or celebrating an anniversary.  In the end, order will help to balance things out. 

 

Don’t try to exert too much influence; sometimes it’s easier to treat the whole than the sum of the parts.