A panel discussion or interview with a leading businesswoman inevitably ends up on the question of ‘work/life balance’.
Do they have it? How do they manage it? When do they get it?
Once upon a time these women would say whether they believe they have it or not and, if they do, what they do to perfectly balance the scales, but now there’s a new shift emerging away from using the term at all. More and more women appear to be disassociating themselves from it and offering new terms to describe the way they live and work instead.
After all, to have such balance is to imply that one segment of the time you spend living is all about earning a living while the other is about spending that living. That may suggest you’re continually counting down the minutes while you’re at ‘work’ in order to get to the minutes you can enjoy while you’re at ‘life’.
Segregating your time into ‘work’ and ‘life’ also implies that when you clock off from work for the day, your team, clients and/or employer should not be able to contact you. So, in fairness, that should also mean that when you clock on to work, those people in your ‘life’ – your friends, partner, kids, parents etc – should leave you alone. It’s one or the other when it comes to balancing the ‘work/life’ scales.
Thinking about work this way may fit with how we’ve traditionally structured and thought about work – as being a place you go to, Monday to Friday between the hours of nine and five, preferably with a ‘wife’ at home to manage everything else – but it’s not particularly conducive to pursuing and encouraging flexible work practices.
Meanwhile, attempting to balance precariously between work and life ignores the fact that our attitudes to how much we can put into work change according to our life stage.
For some, that means having little to no interest in the idea of trying to balance anything at all. As entrepreneur Gen George tells Women’s Agenda today: “People always go on about the work life balance thing, but I think having a life is finding something you are passionate about doing. And this is my passion.”
That appears to be how Boost Juice founder Janine Allis thinks about her work. She once told Women’s Agenda that her secret is about “understanding that there is a time in your business life that to be successful you need to throw the idea of ‘work/life balance’ out the window and commit everything to the success of your venture.”
Speaking on a panel at a fundraiser for School for Life last week, Pottinger CEO Cassandra Kelly said she’s redefined how she thinks about ‘work/life balance’.
“I believe in integration. Work is part of something that nourishes me. It is something that I actually want to do. That is how I have redefined for me the notion of balance.”
Many successful women know or have learned that striving for ‘work/life balance’ is likely to leave them disappointed. The effort is simply not worth the reward of being able to declare you’ve perfectly managed to carve out a safety zone between the competing pressures of both worlds.
Blending ‘work’ and ‘life’ will ultimately enable more flexibility – and consequently the ability to live and work the way we want.