The last couple weeks we've been having
many conversations about living a balanced life, specifically when it
comes to your job. Are you the kind of person that lives to work or
works to live? Maybe it's not that simple.
We have been talking about the value
around how much time you spend on the job and commuting vs leisure at
home with family and friends. Although many people still have a 9-5
type job where the boundaries and compensation of those hours are
very clear, there are many more people in "exempt" (or
salaried) positions who find that those boundaries are not as clear
and recently becoming more and more broken. It might start with an
employer provided smart phone (sometimes considered compensation) or
even working at home, that allows coworkers to get in touch with you
24/7 and vice versa, which makes "going to the office" more
and more irrelevant to get business done. This brings a lot of
apparent freedom for an individual who can more easily take care of
personal tasks during times that used to be off limits due to office
hours, but it also carries a sacrifice when there is no "out of
office" hours anymore and life becomes a constant cacophony of
work and personal, all intermingled. Most of us start to experience
heightened stress levels and even physical illness when we aren't
able to isolate different parts of our lives that need to be handled
in different ways.
Further, employers like to market these
flexible work arrangements as non-monetary compensation, all but
ignoring the huge benefit to the company in having employees
basically on call 24/7. What it comes down to is that we have to
take more personal responsibility for setting expectations and
boundaries, based on the benefits vs sacrifice in each situation.
The good news is that this isn't a new
problem, as long as there has been work a person had to decide how
much they were willing to do before they took a break to do something
else. What is new is the technology which doesn't discriminate
between an email from your spouse, a tweet from a stranger or a call
from your boss when it's on. It will prompt you constantly with
reminder tones, if you let it, and managing those alerts can be a job
in itself.
At the end of the day, we each have to
decide how much of a sacrifice our personal time is compared to the
benefit of a flexible work location or how often we are willing to
answer those business messages compared to the compensation we
receive to do so. Do you love your job so the sacrifice isn't
significant? Is work interfering with your close, loving
relationships because you're afraid to miss an important message?
Are you missing out on life because you're tied to a screen waiting
for the next bit of information to cross it? Or are you out enjoying
more because you can answer those calls ala carte? It's a tough call
sometimes and these are questions I pose often.
What are your thoughts?
On a related note, a friend of mine
mentioned that in the "old days" people's livelihood was
their life. For example, farmers and people who own their own
business such as a store or restaurant. Although they might not have
a boss pinging them past bed time, they might have customers
demanding their time or sick animals to take care of into the night.
How did they create balance?
A topic as old as time, I'd love to
hear what you think!
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