Forget About Work-Life Balance – Try This Instead

For decades, the mark of honor among workers was just how burned out you were: “I didn’t sleep all last week! I worked 30 hours of overtime! I haven’t seen my family in days!”

Thankfully, the work culture has swung away from that in the past decade or so, and focused much more on humane working hours. 

But it’s led to this thing which sounds so great in theory, and can be really demotivating in practice: work-life balance.

Sounds great. Is impossible to actually achieve, and thus, demotivating.

The truth is, sometimes your work life requires more of you, and sometimes your home life requires more.  If your goal is to make sure that everything is 50/50, all the time, you will constantly be trying to shift something, and that takes so much energy. (Remember how we all used to multitask too, until the costs of task-switching became apparent? Same energy drain applies here.)

That’s why we’ve been focusing on work-life rhythm instead.

Instead of aiming for a mythical 50-50 focus, work-life rhythm is a more flexible approach that puts you and your needs at the center. You feel into what works for you, and give yourself the grace to work more when you need to, knowing that next week, things will look different.

Unlike balance, rhythm is dynamic, just like humans. Your physical and emotional capacity for work fluctuates frequently, over the course of days, weeks, months, and years. And if you can learn to tap into that rhythm, suddenly, everything gets a whole lot easier.

So how do you tap into your work-life rhythm?

By doing our favorite thing: asking questions, and giving honest answers. Start by asking yourself, do you overwork or underwork? If you overwork, then chances are you’ll need fairly unyielding parameters in place. 

For instance, I’m an over-worker (read: I work hard, and I work a lot). For me, this means I can’t do laundry or dishes during the day, because once I start, I will be overworking on non-work tasks. I go on walks during the day, but never errands, because my priorities will get messed up and my rhythm gets disrupted. 

If you’re an under-worker (read: easily sidetracked), you have to create rules, too. It may be best for you to be in the office at least four days a week so that you are not distracted by things you’d rather be doing and can easily hold yourself to account.

Now that you’ve got a sense of your starting point, continue to develop your understanding of your work-life rhythm.

Experiment with your schedule, set boundaries with yourself and others as needed, and keep track of how things play out. Use that feedback to re-evaluate and tweak as needed – we find that once a quarter seems to be a good length of time for one “cycle” of your schedule. 

It’s all about bringing more humanity back to work – which is a core tenet of everything we do here at PointNorth.

Curious about how we can help you accomplish more by doing aligned, human-centered work? Let’s chat.