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Work life balance is impossible

wheelerof4te 4y ago
Obviously, the work you do will affect your personal life. Does your work have a strict 09:00-17:00 schedule? What type of work? How much required comunication outside of work? Is your work dangerous or stressful for you? There is a lot of variables to crunch before you can define what is your work-life balance.
andreyk 4y ago
Here is the key bit: "When you hear “balance,” you immediately think of a dichotomy. For two things to be balanceable, they must be at odds with each other. Lowering one side of the scale must raise the other side. When we describe work and life as things to be balanced, we are suggesting that work and life are at odds with each other. More time or energy allocated to work means less time and energy allocated to life. This is obviously absurd, though. Work is just another part of life like family, community, food, fitness, creativity, travel, fun, spirituality, etc. The question isn’t how do you balance work and life, but how do you create a healthy relationship among work and the various other important areas of life? " This is completely pedantic - obviously work is literally a part of life, so the phrase means exactly what the author states in the last paragraph. Not worth reading IMO.
- amirhirsch 4y ago
  balance: the perennial virtue of the under-achiever
  - swagasaurus-rex 4y ago
    I read an article recently suggesting top-performers in the army tend to be happy. https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/top-performers-have-a-superpower-happiness/ https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/top-performers-have-a-su... While balance isn't required for happiness, I know many imbalanced, unhappy and underachieving people.
    - amirhirsch 4y ago
      It was meant to be funny, not controversial! I'm sure the world is full of balanced, happy people, with both lives and achievements!
  - brackass 4y ago
    under-achiever seems like an odd word. Not everyone values “achievement” over everything else.
  - unethical_ban 4y ago
    This is a joke that doesn't land because there is a high likelihood that some here believe this.
    - Lich 4y ago
      It's interesting how different people view it differently. I don't agree with the joke in meaning, but when I read it, I assumed he was making a joke or being sarcastic and wasn't trying to offend anybody, whereas the first reply took it seriously.
    - amirhirsch 4y ago
      The joke doesn't land because people feel both unbalanced and under-achieved and largely powerless to change it.
  - UncleMeat 4y ago
    First, so the fuck what? Is it so wrong to have different goals than "rise up the corporate ladder and make stacks on stacks on stacks"? It is not morally wrong to prioritize different things. Second, if we consider "achievement" to be measured by income I have far better work-life balance as a software engineer than the person who cleans my house, despite me making 10x what she makes. There doesn't appear to be some global correlation between working hard or long hours and pay.
- bilekas 4y ago
  I couldn't agree more. A previous company I worked for used to force push a day or two off every month for 'work-life balance'. I would throw my laptop on and do a bit of something that was annoying me because it's what I really wanted to do and at that particular time I was excited about solving it. The next day I went into work and was super happy to explain how I solved the issue as it had been annoying the team for too long. I was a senior at the time but my lead called a meeting with me. He continued to berate me for working and telling others I was doing some work. While I could see his point, some juniors might feel pressure to do the same, but it was how I wanted to enjoy my time. So after this, I really promote a work life balance but give the autonomy to the employee to find theirs. Now with my team its very clear and unless there is something absolutely mission critical we always facilitate. Our productivity and reliability has gone through the roof, everyone is much more in control of their work.
  - jefftk 4y ago
    I've also gotten this feedback from my boss, that I was accidentally setting a standard of prioritizing work in a way that might lead others to think that's what they should be doing. The way I handled it was when people were sharing what they had done in their off times (a) preferentially talking about interesting non-work things I'd done, (b) being clearly supportive of others doing non-work things, and (c) not being the first to bring up a story if I was going to be talking about work things. I also tried not to send work-related communication to others after hours if I was doing some work later in the day. ("I want to do work all the time" is not a way I usually feel. I've just as often had trouble working while at work, let alone keeping myself from working after hours. And there were also times when I was working fewer hours than was typical on the team but at odd hours that could erroneously have given the impression that I was working extra hours.)
    - bilekas 4y ago
      These are actually great tips and will definitely be thinking of them in the future! As a side note, just read your "Can Ads be GDPR Compliant" the other day, great work!
    - deleted 4y ago
- bitexploder 4y ago
  I always like the phrasing "work life harmony". Work is not an opposing force to things that are not work. It is a thing we all have to do. Some of us like doing it, some don't, but I strive to help work finds its place in my life. There are trade offs and there is an act of balancing in some senses, but in the larger philosophical sense harmony just fits better for my world view.
- deleted 4y ago
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nimbius 4y ago
one could make a cogent argument that the point of 'work life balance' and the cult of mindfulness mandates from HR was not to serve as a poultice for a wounded working class, but rather to distance and externalize the risk corporations faced from inherent, systematic abuses they commonly engage in with legal impunity and to gaslight those very same workers into internalizing their burnout and exhaustion as a function of something they were instead doing to themselves. it was to keep you worried about yourself, so as not to say, collectivize any sort of action against the real culprit.
- adamgordonbell 4y ago
  Interesting! defined benefits pension plan -> "How to plan for retirement" HR Meeting defined work hours -> "How to have a work life balance" HR meeting Moving left to right saves money and moves the burden to the employee. What other examples exist?
  - advisedwang 4y ago
    Another example is that in the past it was very common for workplaces to hire generally capable people and then train them to do the specific job needed; now its much more common to expect you to understand the specific job and for you to be productive much earlier. In other words, training has moved from the responsibility of the company to the responsibility of the job hunter.
robg 4y ago
I buy this argument by pointing out the necessity of sleep for core brain functions. Good luck living or working well if you’re not sleeping well. And yet, how many of us have gone years without good sleep?
binarysolo 4y ago
Kinda click-baity and not a lot of substance, prob not worth the 5 min reading it. Article TLDR - work is part of life (duh) and you're just trying to integrate everything.
fruit2020 4y ago
Yes, language defines how we think, and the choice of words is important. But I don’t think I’m stuck in a loop trying to find the ‘balance’ between work and life, because ‘there can never be balance’. If you work a 9-5 job just cut off any work after 5. Adapt to the environment, if everybody is slacking and you don’t win anything by working too hard, than don’t work too hard. I think you should strive to maximize the return on your time. Be it more money for less time, or more enjoyment, more satisfaction, you need to understand why you spend your time, and how to get the most out of it.
GCA10 4y ago
Agree with earlier commenters. OP uses lots of words to suggest what's really a one-word tweak: "Work-life alignment" covers the key concepts in a way that "work-life balance" does not. My best years have been ingeniously unbalanced -- with many months of sprinting to get a work project done, offset by a month of trekking in Nepal. That was a keeper.
vages 4y ago
"Making friends at work or coworking with friends can help support relationships and fun." And one day, it just isn't fun. Who do turn to for support? Will your friends be there when you quit your job? And to the contrary: If your friend, family and co-workers are all the same, how will you cope at work when going through a divorce? I'd say there's a meta-balance to be had here. If you over-integrate your "buckets", you're removing redundancy from your life.
- PragmaticPulp 4y ago
  Nobody is suggesting that you only make friendships at work or that you don't have any friends outside of work. That's a bad idea. It is self-defeating to avoid becoming friendly with anyone you do work with, though. And for what it's worth, my work friends were indeed very supportive when I quit past jobs. Leaving the job didn't end our friendships.
  - autotune 4y ago
    The only interactions I have had from past coworkers in 10 years of working full time is one of them occasionally likes a post I make on LinkedIn. YMMV.
yboris 4y ago
I suspect 4DWW - Four Day Work Week - would tremendously help in achieving a better work life balance. Having worked many weeks that way made a tremendous difference in my life and happiness.
jedberg 4y ago
Work and life is a dichotomy for most people. Most people don't want to work. They do it because they have to. So everything else on the list is "life", and work is work. And we want to balance the two to make sure that we still have enough time for everything we want to do (life), and work. Some people are lucky enough to love their job, so the balance is easy because work is part of life for them. But for most people they'd always rather to more "life" and less "work".
- gernb 4y ago
  Dating sites would disagree. The majority of profiles claim they love the job and are looking for someone that loves their job. Of course maybe they're on the dating site because they love their job :P
  - jedberg 4y ago
    A lot of people, especially young single people, tell themselves they love their job to make going to it, and spending all their waking hours there, bearable. :)
  - JimtheCoder 4y ago
    "Dating sites would disagree. The majority of profiles claim they love the job and are looking for someone that loves their job." My dating profile once claimed I was a polyglot, a Rhodes Scholar and an astronaut (all with photographic proof) before the age of 22, so...
  - torben-friis 4y ago
    It’s code for “I have money and I don’t maintain bums”.
- chadlavi 4y ago
  Not sure I'd call people who love to work lucky!
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  I think a lot of people want to work. Maybe not full-time, but not none. I think most of those same people don't want to do the same work 40 hours a week, 48-50 weeks a year, for a boss, probably with significant alienation from the actual product or benefit of the work. Labor is so very much more tolerable when you can favor entirely different sorts of work, week to week, and can see tangible benefits to your effort—for someone, at least, if not for yourself. I'd like—genuinely like—programming if I could hit it really hard about one week a month and mostly ignore it the rest of the time. But I hate doing it full-time. I like building fences. Or tiling floors. Actually like it! I'd hate doing either every single week, all year. I'd hate it a lot. Two or three weeks a year, for each, though? I'd actually enjoy it. That sort of thing. Shit, I'm a pretty big gamer, even, but on the rare occasions I get two entire days to do almost nothing but couch-potato and play video games, by the afternoon of day 2 I'm usually done with games for at least a couple weeks. Zero desire to touch them. That's not even work, exactly, but you'd have to pay me to get me to keep going, even with no strings attached (no having to write reports, no bugtesting, just playing games). An average of an hour or two a day, though? 4 hours here, 1 there, 2 another day? I never hit my limit, always want more. My job is like that, too, but it's constantly at the "I hate this now and wish I could stop" burnout stage, because every week has at least 2x too much of it for it to be sustainable at an enjoyable level.
jonfw 4y ago
> When Luntz consulted for the Bush administration, “global warming” was a growing concern that the White House didn’t want to deal with. So Luntz suggested shifting from calling it “global warming,” which sounds scary, to calling it “climate change,” which at the time at least sounded much less intimidating. It was apparently luck that it ended up being the more accurate term anyway. For me- work life balance is already taking advantage of creative wording. If I discuss "work life balance" with my employer- I don't really want to talk about my personal life. Really, what I'm talking about is managing expectations, hours, or responsibility. But, the optics of saying "work life balance" are much better than "reducing responsibility"
_8j50 4y ago
Wow. > Time with your family is much more enjoyable if you incorporate fun, work, creativity, and fitness, instead of seeing it as taking away from those things. I hope OP reads this. "Work/life balance" is corporate speak for "my personal shit is none of your business". I don't have much of a life and a lot of what I do is work centered and that is all on purpose on my end. But the relationship between work and personal life is absolutley subtractive and adversarial. You can do what you want on your own time but not on work time. If I have a work goal I need to get done, I can easily spend all of my time and energy on it which means I can't do whatever I want personally. I know a lot of people that don't put in as much me because they have actual families. There was a work situation where I had to work 12+ on weekends and evenings straight for a few weeks, people I counted on and mentored were bailing out because they had family committments. And that is what balance is. We have 24 hours in a day, you can't have two things as your #1 priority at any given time of the day. I absolutely never ever want to invole anyone at work with anything in my personal life either and many agree with me on this. I did try to this b.s. before and things did not go well. Don't eat where you shit. My personal life is for me to do whatever I want. I don't need to work if I can't do what I want with my compensation from work. This is the critical difference between an employee and a servant. To phrase it differently: work/life balance is intentionally worded that way because it is a restriction on expectations by employeers from employees. My personal is not additive to anything work related because I never agreed to that and I am not being compensated for that.
ball_of_lint 4y ago
Working for money is imperative in most people's lives. The failure to do so carries a heavy stick including poverty, homelessness, health issues, the list goes on. Contrary to the article, balance is impossible first because our economy and low-paying jobs are designed to lock people in them, creating a cycle of living paycheck to paycheck and barely surviving financially. Work might be an important part of a life where it's not a person's top priority due to finance survival reasons, but would naturally be structured differently. Only in this privileged state is "balance" or "alignment" possible. Even so, I suspect not every healthy person would choose to work, given the opportunity to not.
- echelon 4y ago
  > Contrary to the article, balance is impossible first because our economy and low-paying jobs are designed to lock people in them, creating a cycle of living paycheck to paycheck and barely surviving financially. > designed [emphasis mine] I'm not so sure it's designed so much as an emergent phenomena. The world has gotten so caught up in value creation that it rewards the roles that are most able to create value or the roles that are non-fungible and necessary. Because of globalization and immigration, the "non-skilled" jobs are conceivably not just available to 16 year old high school students. Immigrants that are just reaching the country and establishing their foothold increase the pool of available labor. The increasing gulf between high paying and low paying jobs is a result of offshoring manufacturing and other types of labor that can be easily purchased at a substantially lower rate on the worldwide market. This has happened because our very own consumers want cheaper goods. And in the big picture, it's not a bad thing - every nation that follows the industrialization pattern has rapidly pulled themselves out of poverty and built up a strong, educated workforce. > Even so, I suspect not every healthy person would choose to work, given the opportunity to not. Personally speaking, if I had the freedom not to work, I would perhaps pursue my own goals or hobbies which may not bring value to the world in the most optimal way. It might even subtract.
  - bloppe 4y ago
    People were locked into work long before there was an economy to speak of. They were hunting, gathering, subsistence farming, spending hours gathering materials and building things from dusk till dawn. Even the poor are generally able to work much less than the historical baseline. I'm not saying the modern economy is fair. It's just easy to lose sight of the fact that it inherently takes a lot of work to live.
kelseyfrog 4y ago
Author makes three fatal assumptions. One is a category error of work and life, the second is what work-life balance means in practice, and the third is for whom work-life balance advice applies. The category error raises its head in the line, "Work is just another part of life like family, community, food, fitness, creativity, travel, fun, spirituality, etc." The author seems to group together all activities one does under the same umbrella as if that makes them equal. We already know they aren't because we often point out the distinction the evergreen antimetabole, "Do you live to work or work to live?" The point of pointing this distinction out is precisely to make one examine one's priorities. It's easy to make excuses at home for time spent at work, but typically much harder to make excuses[1] at work for time spent at home. Excuses is a poor way to phrase this, but it highlights exactly the problem of putting work and life on the same level. If you cringe at reading the phrase "excuses at work" it's because work and home have this difference. Rather, we usually say "setting time boundaries on work" because we see work as one thing and life as another. Finally, we must acknowledge that this boundary setting and it's formulation comes easier to some and harder to others. When the author attempts to universalize his advice, ignoring context, it ceases to be useful. Setting work boundaries is crucial to folks for whom boundary setting is more difficult. But to omit this is the final nail in the coffin of the author's bad advice. In my own experience, personal growth came from doing exactly the opposite of what the author suggests. If instead, I had blindly taken his advice, I'd risk losing everything I hold dear. That's why it's bad advice.
dheera 4y ago
I think this is an extremely privileged view. The problem is many people are forced to work 80+ hours a week OR risk losing their immigration status, access to healthcare, and many other things. They have literally zero time left for activities that are restorative to mental health. Having your work be something you "love" to do is an incredibly privileged position to have. A few people can do it. The vast majority of the population cannot. Even those that do it usually run into mental health issues at the point where their "loved" career gets entangled with customer and political issues, if they cannot emotionally extricate themselves from their careers. And be careful before telling someone that they can just change their job. Changing jobs is easy if you're a citizen, the economy is in good shape, and you have a bit of a financial cushion to get you through a couple unemployed months. For a lot of others, it's hard. The bottom line is TIME is a finite, zero-sum resource, and there's no way to change that. It has to be a balance in terms of time allocation at the least. This is good stuff to think about, but I still do think the "balance" framework is a good one because it's a simple one. At the very least, if you can reach a state where you are able to budget work TIME and non-work TIME, many of the other things the article talks about will naturally fall into place without having to think too much.
twblalock 4y ago
Of course work-life balance is possible. Many people achieve it. I have, and so have a lot of other people I know who work in a variety of industries. In fact, the majority of Americans like their jobs, despite the relentless barrage of nonsense in the media about "quiet quitting" and a "great resignation" that never actually happened: https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2016/10/06/3-how-americans-view-their-jobs/ https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2016/10/06/3-how-a...
Beaver117 4y ago
Some people (like me) just don't want to work and have to figure out how to sustain themselves with the minimum work possible. I've worked with people who will gladly pull all nighters to get that last ticket finished. Absolutely crazy. Honestly would rather be homeless than work like that.
strulovich 4y ago
> So Luntz suggested shifting from calling it “global warming,” which sounds scary, to calling it “climate change,” which at the time at least sounded much less intimidating. It was apparently luck that it ended up being the more accurate term anyway. This doesn’t check out, it was a more accurate term so it stuck due to no opposition to it. By then it was clear climate can change not just by warming as a result of man made activities. The movie “The day after tomorrow” came out on 2004 (so production started a bunch earlier) using a popular perception that things can freeze from good old CO2. (They do explain it in the movie, since this was during the transition of terms)
cactusplant7374 4y ago
It's just better to quit your job every few years and take 6 months off. And then find a new job that pays more. I haven't done it yet but I've been thinking about it for years.
- wheelerof4te 4y ago
  Vast majority of people can't do job-hopping. Not everyone is a software developer. Even if you are, seeing your ever increasing "track record" should be alarming to every new employer.
  - cactusplant7374 4y ago
    Track record? I don’t really think we are supposed to work continuously to 70 when our bodies are completely busted. What good is traveling then when your body hurts? Plenty of non software developers take breaks. The van life folks in particular. It requires a substantial sacrifice. A lot of people in tech jump jobs every few years anyway, right? What does it matter if you take a break for a trip?
    - wheelerof4te 4y ago
      "Track record? I don’t really think we are supposed to work continuously to 70 when our bodies are completely busted." I agree, but the track record I was thinking of is the number of companies you worked for previously. Not the years spent working.
null_object 4y ago
Article: boring. Image of Philippe Petit wire walking between the Twin Towers: amazing.
5350-uiop-1130 4y ago
if you want work-life balance get promoted. assuming you work a techie office job. my managers barely work, they often don't come in during mandatory hybrid days and when they do it's just for lunch then out by 3. there are only 2 types of people in every company - implementers, the ones who actually makes things and reviewers/approvers - the management types that does jack shit but has plenty of opinions and demands on what you're doing.
- standardUser 4y ago
  That's circumstantial. I've seen plenty of managers get by doing next to nothing. I've seen many other managers have their lives completely consumed by constant meetings and demanding/needy/lazy bosses. The former is a nice gig if you can get it. The latter looks like a living hell.
Multicomp 4y ago
The lists of parts of life reminds me of the GTD areas of focus at Horizon 2. Once you have a list of what your areas of focus are, you can then pick goals (horizon 3 and 4) based on your overall life principles (Horizon 5). So the exercise then becomes maximizing achieving the goals of each area of focus, and where they conflict, subordinating a particular area of focus to another one based on your priorities, which are themselves driven by your overall life principles in Horizon 5.
standardUser 4y ago
This comes off as a little too targeted at comfy professionals who have money and career security and flexibility (shocking for HN, I know). For most people, working is at odds with all of those other components of life. It's not just one of many components. It's almost invariably the component we would remove from our lives if we had the opportunity.
fedeb95 4y ago
First of all thanks for the book recommendation which seems interesting. I think however that your conclusions are "a" way of looking at it, given certain circumstances, which I assume are yours. In many cases, work is indeed something to balance against: when employers have the same dichotomy in mind, you must balance against that, otherwise work will override your other activities. And some people don't have the luxury of changing jobs. It's not my position fortunately but I know many.
vinceguidry 4y ago
There can be no harmony between work and life for most people because capitalism isn't interested in your happiness. It only wants to turn piles of money into bigger piles of money. Invariably whatever you do to manage your relationship with work will come to the attention of a manager who will make it their job to disabuse you of the notion that the managerial relationship can go both ways. They manage you, you can only negotiate with them. And they will never consider themselves held to any bargain you strike with them other than one that can be held up in court. Some workplaces are more or less forced to accommodate (a subset of) their employees. But this only lasts as long as economic conditions force them to. As soon as those conditions change, get ready for the new fleet of managers ready to pound all the pegs into these square holes, never you mind what shape you are. Work is always, at best, a tenuous truce.
hotdamnson 4y ago
I mitigate the imbalance by minimalism. For example I spend only about 20% of what I make (after taxes). It's not that difficult for IT guys and remote world we live in right now.
trynewideas 4y ago
> If a parent says, “my family is my life,” you don’t typically look down on them or think they have some sort of unhealthy obsession they can’t break out of. Their children bring immense meaning to their life, and you respect them for it. But if someone says, “my work is my life,” we treat it differently. Why? Saying "my ____ is my life" and meaning it, means living disproportionately for the benefit of that blank over your own benefit. Living disproportionately for the benefit of your family is, depending on your role in your society, at worst expected and at best compassionate. "Their children" — or their spouse, or their parents, or whatever they define as a family — "bring immense meaning to their life"? No. They love their family. That family inherently brings nothing, not meaning nor value nor anything remotely resembling a return on investment, that each member of the family itself doesn't choose to bring to it. Doing that as an employee of a for-profit company, which most workers are, is at best mockably foolish and at worst literally suicidal. Even when you're healthy and content, it's self-sabotage. You are giving most of yourself to an entity that, if you were instantly vaporized, would only do something that approximates caring about you if you had generated a significant amount of its revenue and could not be readily replaced. Since everyone can be replaced in a company, a company cannot care about you. Working for yourself, for a cause other than profit, or for or with a group of people who genuinely care for each other, is different — hopefully, obviously so — but also rarer and not what people tend to mock when they mock an obsession with work. Obsession with a craft, or work toward a common good, or a creative venture is more often seen as virtuous, or at least an aspirational goal, than a personal failing. When someone overworks themselves for a venture like that and falls apart, communities rally around them. When someone overworks themselves caring for a family and falls apart, people raise funds and rally to support them. But when someone overworks themselves for a massive company and falls apart, that's — whether or not fairly assessed — the obvious consequences of a personal decision to prioritize someone else's wealth-generation apparatus over your own life. > We can get a clue for how it becomes a problem by thinking about when the Family focused person becomes concerning. If they have no hobbies, no friends, no creative outlet, or poor health, then we might be worried that they are overly focused on their family. No, because a family is emphatically not an employer, no matter how much work it requires. A family is not a bucket into which one pours their labor in return for specific value. A family is other people. A family is a group where almost every person in it is, on some level, capable of focusing on everyone else in it. If a person puts that much effort into their family and few or no others in that family can or will help that person, then that person is being abused — if not by the family itself then by societal forces like a lack of fundamental security or caretaking support — both of which typically require those people to do what to survive in modern society? Extensive, and one might even mistaken it for obsessive, employee labor in exchange for currency. > We can say the same for work. In the majority of cases we literally can't, because most workers put their effort into a company's shared goal and intentionally receive less value than what they put into it. It's an exchange of labor for currency, and most of those exchanges are at a rate that benefits specific other people at the company more. A company, and especially the people who derive the most financial benefit from the company, does not care if you are overwhelmed — arguably, it does not care if you live or die — beyond how much your state affects how much monetary value you can provide to it. It's a fundamentally different exchange in every way. Oranges and apples have vastly more in common than familial caretaking and employee labor. The closest thing one can even reach for as something common between a person overwhelmed by their family and a person overwhelmed by their employer, is that their societies have failed them both.

Obviously, the work you do will affect your personal life. Does your work have a strict 09:00-17:00 schedule? What type of work? How much required comunication outside of work? Is your work dangerous or stressful for you? There is a lot of variables to crunch before you can define what is your work-life balance.

andreyk 4y ago

Here is the key bit: "When you hear “balance,” you immediately think of a dichotomy. For two things to be balanceable, they must be at odds with each other. Lowering one side of the scale must raise the other side. When we describe work and life as things to be balanced, we are suggesting that work and life are at odds with each other. More time or energy allocated to work means less time and energy allocated to life. This is obviously absurd, though. Work is just another part of life like family, community, food, fitness, creativity, travel, fun, spirituality, etc. The question isn’t how do you balance work and life, but how do you create a healthy relationship among work and the various other important areas of life? " This is completely pedantic - obviously work is literally a part of life, so the phrase means exactly what the author states in the last paragraph. Not worth reading IMO.

amirhirsch 4y ago
balance: the perennial virtue of the under-achiever
- swagasaurus-rex 4y ago
  I read an article recently suggesting top-performers in the army tend to be happy. https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/top-performers-have-a-superpower-happiness/ https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/top-performers-have-a-su... While balance isn't required for happiness, I know many imbalanced, unhappy and underachieving people.
  - amirhirsch 4y ago
    It was meant to be funny, not controversial! I'm sure the world is full of balanced, happy people, with both lives and achievements!
- brackass 4y ago
  under-achiever seems like an odd word. Not everyone values “achievement” over everything else.
- unethical_ban 4y ago
  This is a joke that doesn't land because there is a high likelihood that some here believe this.
  - Lich 4y ago
    It's interesting how different people view it differently. I don't agree with the joke in meaning, but when I read it, I assumed he was making a joke or being sarcastic and wasn't trying to offend anybody, whereas the first reply took it seriously.
  - amirhirsch 4y ago
    The joke doesn't land because people feel both unbalanced and under-achieved and largely powerless to change it.
- UncleMeat 4y ago
  First, so the fuck what? Is it so wrong to have different goals than "rise up the corporate ladder and make stacks on stacks on stacks"? It is not morally wrong to prioritize different things. Second, if we consider "achievement" to be measured by income I have far better work-life balance as a software engineer than the person who cleans my house, despite me making 10x what she makes. There doesn't appear to be some global correlation between working hard or long hours and pay.
bilekas 4y ago
I couldn't agree more. A previous company I worked for used to force push a day or two off every month for 'work-life balance'. I would throw my laptop on and do a bit of something that was annoying me because it's what I really wanted to do and at that particular time I was excited about solving it. The next day I went into work and was super happy to explain how I solved the issue as it had been annoying the team for too long. I was a senior at the time but my lead called a meeting with me. He continued to berate me for working and telling others I was doing some work. While I could see his point, some juniors might feel pressure to do the same, but it was how I wanted to enjoy my time. So after this, I really promote a work life balance but give the autonomy to the employee to find theirs. Now with my team its very clear and unless there is something absolutely mission critical we always facilitate. Our productivity and reliability has gone through the roof, everyone is much more in control of their work.
- jefftk 4y ago
  I've also gotten this feedback from my boss, that I was accidentally setting a standard of prioritizing work in a way that might lead others to think that's what they should be doing. The way I handled it was when people were sharing what they had done in their off times (a) preferentially talking about interesting non-work things I'd done, (b) being clearly supportive of others doing non-work things, and (c) not being the first to bring up a story if I was going to be talking about work things. I also tried not to send work-related communication to others after hours if I was doing some work later in the day. ("I want to do work all the time" is not a way I usually feel. I've just as often had trouble working while at work, let alone keeping myself from working after hours. And there were also times when I was working fewer hours than was typical on the team but at odd hours that could erroneously have given the impression that I was working extra hours.)
  - bilekas 4y ago
    These are actually great tips and will definitely be thinking of them in the future! As a side note, just read your "Can Ads be GDPR Compliant" the other day, great work!
  - deleted 4y ago
bitexploder 4y ago
I always like the phrasing "work life harmony". Work is not an opposing force to things that are not work. It is a thing we all have to do. Some of us like doing it, some don't, but I strive to help work finds its place in my life. There are trade offs and there is an act of balancing in some senses, but in the larger philosophical sense harmony just fits better for my world view.
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nimbius 4y ago

one could make a cogent argument that the point of 'work life balance' and the cult of mindfulness mandates from HR was not to serve as a poultice for a wounded working class, but rather to distance and externalize the risk corporations faced from inherent, systematic abuses they commonly engage in with legal impunity and to gaslight those very same workers into internalizing their burnout and exhaustion as a function of something they were instead doing to themselves. it was to keep you worried about yourself, so as not to say, collectivize any sort of action against the real culprit.

adamgordonbell 4y ago
Interesting! defined benefits pension plan -> "How to plan for retirement" HR Meeting defined work hours -> "How to have a work life balance" HR meeting Moving left to right saves money and moves the burden to the employee. What other examples exist?
- advisedwang 4y ago
  Another example is that in the past it was very common for workplaces to hire generally capable people and then train them to do the specific job needed; now its much more common to expect you to understand the specific job and for you to be productive much earlier. In other words, training has moved from the responsibility of the company to the responsibility of the job hunter.

robg 4y ago

I buy this argument by pointing out the necessity of sleep for core brain functions. Good luck living or working well if you’re not sleeping well. And yet, how many of us have gone years without good sleep?

binarysolo 4y ago

Kinda click-baity and not a lot of substance, prob not worth the 5 min reading it. Article TLDR - work is part of life (duh) and you're just trying to integrate everything.

fruit2020 4y ago

Yes, language defines how we think, and the choice of words is important. But I don’t think I’m stuck in a loop trying to find the ‘balance’ between work and life, because ‘there can never be balance’. If you work a 9-5 job just cut off any work after 5. Adapt to the environment, if everybody is slacking and you don’t win anything by working too hard, than don’t work too hard. I think you should strive to maximize the return on your time. Be it more money for less time, or more enjoyment, more satisfaction, you need to understand why you spend your time, and how to get the most out of it.

GCA10 4y ago

Agree with earlier commenters. OP uses lots of words to suggest what's really a one-word tweak: "Work-life alignment" covers the key concepts in a way that "work-life balance" does not. My best years have been ingeniously unbalanced -- with many months of sprinting to get a work project done, offset by a month of trekking in Nepal. That was a keeper.

vages 4y ago

"Making friends at work or coworking with friends can help support relationships and fun." And one day, it just isn't fun. Who do turn to for support? Will your friends be there when you quit your job? And to the contrary: If your friend, family and co-workers are all the same, how will you cope at work when going through a divorce? I'd say there's a meta-balance to be had here. If you over-integrate your "buckets", you're removing redundancy from your life.

PragmaticPulp 4y ago
Nobody is suggesting that you only make friendships at work or that you don't have any friends outside of work. That's a bad idea. It is self-defeating to avoid becoming friendly with anyone you do work with, though. And for what it's worth, my work friends were indeed very supportive when I quit past jobs. Leaving the job didn't end our friendships.
- autotune 4y ago
  The only interactions I have had from past coworkers in 10 years of working full time is one of them occasionally likes a post I make on LinkedIn. YMMV.

yboris 4y ago

I suspect 4DWW - Four Day Work Week - would tremendously help in achieving a better work life balance. Having worked many weeks that way made a tremendous difference in my life and happiness.

jedberg 4y ago

Work and life is a dichotomy for most people. Most people don't want to work. They do it because they have to. So everything else on the list is "life", and work is work. And we want to balance the two to make sure that we still have enough time for everything we want to do (life), and work. Some people are lucky enough to love their job, so the balance is easy because work is part of life for them. But for most people they'd always rather to more "life" and less "work".

gernb 4y ago
Dating sites would disagree. The majority of profiles claim they love the job and are looking for someone that loves their job. Of course maybe they're on the dating site because they love their job :P
- jedberg 4y ago
  A lot of people, especially young single people, tell themselves they love their job to make going to it, and spending all their waking hours there, bearable. :)
- JimtheCoder 4y ago
  "Dating sites would disagree. The majority of profiles claim they love the job and are looking for someone that loves their job." My dating profile once claimed I was a polyglot, a Rhodes Scholar and an astronaut (all with photographic proof) before the age of 22, so...
- torben-friis 4y ago
  It’s code for “I have money and I don’t maintain bums”.
chadlavi 4y ago
Not sure I'd call people who love to work lucky!
yamtaddle 4y ago
I think a lot of people want to work. Maybe not full-time, but not none. I think most of those same people don't want to do the same work 40 hours a week, 48-50 weeks a year, for a boss, probably with significant alienation from the actual product or benefit of the work. Labor is so very much more tolerable when you can favor entirely different sorts of work, week to week, and can see tangible benefits to your effort—for someone, at least, if not for yourself. I'd like—genuinely like—programming if I could hit it really hard about one week a month and mostly ignore it the rest of the time. But I hate doing it full-time. I like building fences. Or tiling floors. Actually like it! I'd hate doing either every single week, all year. I'd hate it a lot. Two or three weeks a year, for each, though? I'd actually enjoy it. That sort of thing. Shit, I'm a pretty big gamer, even, but on the rare occasions I get two entire days to do almost nothing but couch-potato and play video games, by the afternoon of day 2 I'm usually done with games for at least a couple weeks. Zero desire to touch them. That's not even work, exactly, but you'd have to pay me to get me to keep going, even with no strings attached (no having to write reports, no bugtesting, just playing games). An average of an hour or two a day, though? 4 hours here, 1 there, 2 another day? I never hit my limit, always want more. My job is like that, too, but it's constantly at the "I hate this now and wish I could stop" burnout stage, because every week has at least 2x too much of it for it to be sustainable at an enjoyable level.

jonfw 4y ago

> When Luntz consulted for the Bush administration, “global warming” was a growing concern that the White House didn’t want to deal with. So Luntz suggested shifting from calling it “global warming,” which sounds scary, to calling it “climate change,” which at the time at least sounded much less intimidating. It was apparently luck that it ended up being the more accurate term anyway. For me- work life balance is already taking advantage of creative wording. If I discuss "work life balance" with my employer- I don't really want to talk about my personal life. Really, what I'm talking about is managing expectations, hours, or responsibility. But, the optics of saying "work life balance" are much better than "reducing responsibility"

_8j50 4y ago

Wow. > Time with your family is much more enjoyable if you incorporate fun, work, creativity, and fitness, instead of seeing it as taking away from those things. I hope OP reads this. "Work/life balance" is corporate speak for "my personal shit is none of your business". I don't have much of a life and a lot of what I do is work centered and that is all on purpose on my end. But the relationship between work and personal life is absolutley subtractive and adversarial. You can do what you want on your own time but not on work time. If I have a work goal I need to get done, I can easily spend all of my time and energy on it which means I can't do whatever I want personally. I know a lot of people that don't put in as much me because they have actual families. There was a work situation where I had to work 12+ on weekends and evenings straight for a few weeks, people I counted on and mentored were bailing out because they had family committments. And that is what balance is. We have 24 hours in a day, you can't have two things as your #1 priority at any given time of the day. I absolutely never ever want to invole anyone at work with anything in my personal life either and many agree with me on this. I did try to this b.s. before and things did not go well. Don't eat where you shit. My personal life is for me to do whatever I want. I don't need to work if I can't do what I want with my compensation from work. This is the critical difference between an employee and a servant. To phrase it differently: work/life balance is intentionally worded that way because it is a restriction on expectations by employeers from employees. My personal is not additive to anything work related because I never agreed to that and I am not being compensated for that.

ball_of_lint 4y ago

Working for money is imperative in most people's lives. The failure to do so carries a heavy stick including poverty, homelessness, health issues, the list goes on. Contrary to the article, balance is impossible first because our economy and low-paying jobs are designed to lock people in them, creating a cycle of living paycheck to paycheck and barely surviving financially. Work might be an important part of a life where it's not a person's top priority due to finance survival reasons, but would naturally be structured differently. Only in this privileged state is "balance" or "alignment" possible. Even so, I suspect not every healthy person would choose to work, given the opportunity to not.

echelon 4y ago
> Contrary to the article, balance is impossible first because our economy and low-paying jobs are designed to lock people in them, creating a cycle of living paycheck to paycheck and barely surviving financially. > designed [emphasis mine] I'm not so sure it's designed so much as an emergent phenomena. The world has gotten so caught up in value creation that it rewards the roles that are most able to create value or the roles that are non-fungible and necessary. Because of globalization and immigration, the "non-skilled" jobs are conceivably not just available to 16 year old high school students. Immigrants that are just reaching the country and establishing their foothold increase the pool of available labor. The increasing gulf between high paying and low paying jobs is a result of offshoring manufacturing and other types of labor that can be easily purchased at a substantially lower rate on the worldwide market. This has happened because our very own consumers want cheaper goods. And in the big picture, it's not a bad thing - every nation that follows the industrialization pattern has rapidly pulled themselves out of poverty and built up a strong, educated workforce. > Even so, I suspect not every healthy person would choose to work, given the opportunity to not. Personally speaking, if I had the freedom not to work, I would perhaps pursue my own goals or hobbies which may not bring value to the world in the most optimal way. It might even subtract.
- bloppe 4y ago
  People were locked into work long before there was an economy to speak of. They were hunting, gathering, subsistence farming, spending hours gathering materials and building things from dusk till dawn. Even the poor are generally able to work much less than the historical baseline. I'm not saying the modern economy is fair. It's just easy to lose sight of the fact that it inherently takes a lot of work to live.

kelseyfrog 4y ago

Author makes three fatal assumptions. One is a category error of work and life, the second is what work-life balance means in practice, and the third is for whom work-life balance advice applies. The category error raises its head in the line, "Work is just another part of life like family, community, food, fitness, creativity, travel, fun, spirituality, etc." The author seems to group together all activities one does under the same umbrella as if that makes them equal. We already know they aren't because we often point out the distinction the evergreen antimetabole, "Do you live to work or work to live?" The point of pointing this distinction out is precisely to make one examine one's priorities. It's easy to make excuses at home for time spent at work, but typically much harder to make excuses[1] at work for time spent at home. Excuses is a poor way to phrase this, but it highlights exactly the problem of putting work and life on the same level. If you cringe at reading the phrase "excuses at work" it's because work and home have this difference. Rather, we usually say "setting time boundaries on work" because we see work as one thing and life as another. Finally, we must acknowledge that this boundary setting and it's formulation comes easier to some and harder to others. When the author attempts to universalize his advice, ignoring context, it ceases to be useful. Setting work boundaries is crucial to folks for whom boundary setting is more difficult. But to omit this is the final nail in the coffin of the author's bad advice. In my own experience, personal growth came from doing exactly the opposite of what the author suggests. If instead, I had blindly taken his advice, I'd risk losing everything I hold dear. That's why it's bad advice.

dheera 4y ago

I think this is an extremely privileged view. The problem is many people are forced to work 80+ hours a week OR risk losing their immigration status, access to healthcare, and many other things. They have literally zero time left for activities that are restorative to mental health. Having your work be something you "love" to do is an incredibly privileged position to have. A few people can do it. The vast majority of the population cannot. Even those that do it usually run into mental health issues at the point where their "loved" career gets entangled with customer and political issues, if they cannot emotionally extricate themselves from their careers. And be careful before telling someone that they can just change their job. Changing jobs is easy if you're a citizen, the economy is in good shape, and you have a bit of a financial cushion to get you through a couple unemployed months. For a lot of others, it's hard. The bottom line is TIME is a finite, zero-sum resource, and there's no way to change that. It has to be a balance in terms of time allocation at the least. This is good stuff to think about, but I still do think the "balance" framework is a good one because it's a simple one. At the very least, if you can reach a state where you are able to budget work TIME and non-work TIME, many of the other things the article talks about will naturally fall into place without having to think too much.

twblalock 4y ago

Of course work-life balance is possible. Many people achieve it. I have, and so have a lot of other people I know who work in a variety of industries. In fact, the majority of Americans like their jobs, despite the relentless barrage of nonsense in the media about "quiet quitting" and a "great resignation" that never actually happened: https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2016/10/06/3-how-americans-view-their-jobs/ https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2016/10/06/3-how-a...

Beaver117 4y ago

Some people (like me) just don't want to work and have to figure out how to sustain themselves with the minimum work possible. I've worked with people who will gladly pull all nighters to get that last ticket finished. Absolutely crazy. Honestly would rather be homeless than work like that.

strulovich 4y ago

> So Luntz suggested shifting from calling it “global warming,” which sounds scary, to calling it “climate change,” which at the time at least sounded much less intimidating. It was apparently luck that it ended up being the more accurate term anyway. This doesn’t check out, it was a more accurate term so it stuck due to no opposition to it. By then it was clear climate can change not just by warming as a result of man made activities. The movie “The day after tomorrow” came out on 2004 (so production started a bunch earlier) using a popular perception that things can freeze from good old CO2. (They do explain it in the movie, since this was during the transition of terms)

cactusplant7374 4y ago

It's just better to quit your job every few years and take 6 months off. And then find a new job that pays more. I haven't done it yet but I've been thinking about it for years.

wheelerof4te 4y ago
Vast majority of people can't do job-hopping. Not everyone is a software developer. Even if you are, seeing your ever increasing "track record" should be alarming to every new employer.
- cactusplant7374 4y ago
  Track record? I don’t really think we are supposed to work continuously to 70 when our bodies are completely busted. What good is traveling then when your body hurts? Plenty of non software developers take breaks. The van life folks in particular. It requires a substantial sacrifice. A lot of people in tech jump jobs every few years anyway, right? What does it matter if you take a break for a trip?
  - wheelerof4te 4y ago
    "Track record? I don’t really think we are supposed to work continuously to 70 when our bodies are completely busted." I agree, but the track record I was thinking of is the number of companies you worked for previously. Not the years spent working.

null_object 4y ago

Article: boring. Image of Philippe Petit wire walking between the Twin Towers: amazing.

5350-uiop-1130 4y ago

if you want work-life balance get promoted. assuming you work a techie office job. my managers barely work, they often don't come in during mandatory hybrid days and when they do it's just for lunch then out by 3. there are only 2 types of people in every company - implementers, the ones who actually makes things and reviewers/approvers - the management types that does jack shit but has plenty of opinions and demands on what you're doing.

standardUser 4y ago
That's circumstantial. I've seen plenty of managers get by doing next to nothing. I've seen many other managers have their lives completely consumed by constant meetings and demanding/needy/lazy bosses. The former is a nice gig if you can get it. The latter looks like a living hell.

Multicomp 4y ago

The lists of parts of life reminds me of the GTD areas of focus at Horizon 2. Once you have a list of what your areas of focus are, you can then pick goals (horizon 3 and 4) based on your overall life principles (Horizon 5). So the exercise then becomes maximizing achieving the goals of each area of focus, and where they conflict, subordinating a particular area of focus to another one based on your priorities, which are themselves driven by your overall life principles in Horizon 5.

standardUser 4y ago

This comes off as a little too targeted at comfy professionals who have money and career security and flexibility (shocking for HN, I know). For most people, working is at odds with all of those other components of life. It's not just one of many components. It's almost invariably the component we would remove from our lives if we had the opportunity.

fedeb95 4y ago

First of all thanks for the book recommendation which seems interesting. I think however that your conclusions are "a" way of looking at it, given certain circumstances, which I assume are yours. In many cases, work is indeed something to balance against: when employers have the same dichotomy in mind, you must balance against that, otherwise work will override your other activities. And some people don't have the luxury of changing jobs. It's not my position fortunately but I know many.

vinceguidry 4y ago

There can be no harmony between work and life for most people because capitalism isn't interested in your happiness. It only wants to turn piles of money into bigger piles of money. Invariably whatever you do to manage your relationship with work will come to the attention of a manager who will make it their job to disabuse you of the notion that the managerial relationship can go both ways. They manage you, you can only negotiate with them. And they will never consider themselves held to any bargain you strike with them other than one that can be held up in court. Some workplaces are more or less forced to accommodate (a subset of) their employees. But this only lasts as long as economic conditions force them to. As soon as those conditions change, get ready for the new fleet of managers ready to pound all the pegs into these square holes, never you mind what shape you are. Work is always, at best, a tenuous truce.

hotdamnson 4y ago

I mitigate the imbalance by minimalism. For example I spend only about 20% of what I make (after taxes). It's not that difficult for IT guys and remote world we live in right now.

trynewideas 4y ago

> If a parent says, “my family is my life,” you don’t typically look down on them or think they have some sort of unhealthy obsession they can’t break out of. Their children bring immense meaning to their life, and you respect them for it. But if someone says, “my work is my life,” we treat it differently. Why? Saying "my ____ is my life" and meaning it, means living disproportionately for the benefit of that blank over your own benefit. Living disproportionately for the benefit of your family is, depending on your role in your society, at worst expected and at best compassionate. "Their children" — or their spouse, or their parents, or whatever they define as a family — "bring immense meaning to their life"? No. They love their family. That family inherently brings nothing, not meaning nor value nor anything remotely resembling a return on investment, that each member of the family itself doesn't choose to bring to it. Doing that as an employee of a for-profit company, which most workers are, is at best mockably foolish and at worst literally suicidal. Even when you're healthy and content, it's self-sabotage. You are giving most of yourself to an entity that, if you were instantly vaporized, would only do something that approximates caring about you if you had generated a significant amount of its revenue and could not be readily replaced. Since everyone can be replaced in a company, a company cannot care about you. Working for yourself, for a cause other than profit, or for or with a group of people who genuinely care for each other, is different — hopefully, obviously so — but also rarer and not what people tend to mock when they mock an obsession with work. Obsession with a craft, or work toward a common good, or a creative venture is more often seen as virtuous, or at least an aspirational goal, than a personal failing. When someone overworks themselves for a venture like that and falls apart, communities rally around them. When someone overworks themselves caring for a family and falls apart, people raise funds and rally to support them. But when someone overworks themselves for a massive company and falls apart, that's — whether or not fairly assessed — the obvious consequences of a personal decision to prioritize someone else's wealth-generation apparatus over your own life. > We can get a clue for how it becomes a problem by thinking about when the Family focused person becomes concerning. If they have no hobbies, no friends, no creative outlet, or poor health, then we might be worried that they are overly focused on their family. No, because a family is emphatically not an employer, no matter how much work it requires. A family is not a bucket into which one pours their labor in return for specific value. A family is other people. A family is a group where almost every person in it is, on some level, capable of focusing on everyone else in it. If a person puts that much effort into their family and few or no others in that family can or will help that person, then that person is being abused — if not by the family itself then by societal forces like a lack of fundamental security or caretaking support — both of which typically require those people to do what to survive in modern society? Extensive, and one might even mistaken it for obsessive, employee labor in exchange for currency. > We can say the same for work. In the majority of cases we literally can't, because most workers put their effort into a company's shared goal and intentionally receive less value than what they put into it. It's an exchange of labor for currency, and most of those exchanges are at a rate that benefits specific other people at the company more. A company, and especially the people who derive the most financial benefit from the company, does not care if you are overwhelmed — arguably, it does not care if you live or die — beyond how much your state affects how much monetary value you can provide to it. It's a fundamentally different exchange in every way. Oranges and apples have vastly more in common than familial caretaking and employee labor. The closest thing one can even reach for as something common between a person overwhelmed by their family and a person overwhelmed by their employer, is that their societies have failed them both.