Is "work-life balance" nonsense?

Originally published on Tumblr.

The whole idea of work-life balance strikes me as absurd. Anyone who doesn’t consider work part of their life – i.e., something to be enjoyed – is wasting their life.

We’ve been talking about work-life balance a lot in my startup. Really smart people who happen to love their work worry about it. I don’t think they’re taking the phrase literally. They aren’t juxtaposing “life” (fun? relaxation?) and non-life (misery? tension? anxiety? death?). I think they’re worried about spending all of their waking hours doing a single thing. If they consider their work fun, the question has to be “Why are they worried about having too much of it?”.

The problem with the idea of balance is that it implies that there’s an equilibrium between work and non-work. I don’t think there is. I think the balance metaphor is wrong. In fact, it’s destructive, because how often are we going to think we’ve got it right? Trying to achieve work-life balance sets us up for failure, and failure is never much fun.

A few weeks ago I read a blog post about burnout. It wasn’t good enough to reference here, but it helped me connect some dots. I realized that the problem with working “too much”, no matter how much you like it, is that it leads to burnout.

Unfortunately I’m not constitutionally sympathetic to the idea of burnout, because it’s never happened to me. I’m blessed with a capacity to do pretty much anything for long periods of time without a great loss of enthusiasm. Having said that, I do notice that over time I become less productive, which is almost certainly a form of burnout, or at least an early sign of it.

Some more dots.

I’ve spent the past few years working a lot. Until a few months ago I’d given up regular exercise, and something not-so-odd happened. I got fat. I hate fat. Fat feels like failure, and God-knows I hate failure. So I started drinking less, eating less, and imposed an exercise routine on myself. The fat problem is on its way to being fixed. But a funny thing happened on the way to Barton Springs. I didn’t start working less. In fact I may be getting more done despite losing an hour a day to exercise.

Of course this is blindingly obvious to all the work-life-balance proponents, but I wonder if I’d have gotten here sooner if we were using a different metaphor?

This morning it occurred to me that maybe it’s not a question of balance but, rather, fuel. Work-life balance sets up a zero-sum straw man: if you work too much, you lose out on “life”. A fuel metaphor puts things in a different perspective. I don’t have a catchy name for it yet, but this is what I’m thinking:

Every day we get an allotment of different kinds of fuels:

work fuel,
exercise fuel,
play fuel,
cooking fuel,
cleaning fuel,
relationship fuel,
sleep fuel, and
do nothing fuel.

We can’t use all that fuel, but using one kind doesn’t take away from the others.

My sleep fuel never lasts me more than 6 or 7 hours. That’s OK. How quickly I burn through my exercise fuel depends on how hard I exercise. Same seems to be true for my work fuel. Just because I exercise doesn’t mean I won’t get through all my work fuel, because it’s not a matter of time anymore.

So far I’m really enjoying this new way of thinking. I’ve never liked zero-sum scenarios, because they can be wrong. Zero-sum economics has probably done more harm to humanity than any other idea we’ve come up with. I have a feeling zero-sum living in the form of work-life balance is doing an equally good job of holding us back and making us unhappy.

So what if instead of trying to achieve an impossible balance we just stove to burn as much fuel as possible? I’m going to give it a try.