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What was work/life balance? We spent decades defining what work/life balance means and what it looks like, but did any of that really look at work/life balance from the perspective of a completely remote environment before? I really don’t think so.

Work/Life is about balancing the things you need to do for your life with the things you need to do for work. When your work says you must work 8 hours a day, 5 days a week for full-time pay and benefits but those hours have to be between 8 am and 6 pm, Monday thru Friday. That gives you 5 hours of wiggle room or 1 hour a day for lunch. What happens if a pipe bursts in your house? The Plumber works the same hours as you. Assuming the fix will take 6 hours, how does your pipe get fixed? 

• Get someone else to sit at your house while the plumber works?
• Take a vacation day?
• Work from home?
• Make up the hours by skipping lunches?

All of this to fit your personal life in and around your work. Instead of asking how to fit your personal life needs around your work, Work/Life balance promotes, well a balance. The largest shift and the bare minimum companies do when they say they have work/life balance is having flexible workable hours, as in, more workable hour options. This is the difference between business hours and hours of operation. They still have their business hours, but now they have extra operational hours. So now you can fit a 40-hour work week in between 7 am through 9 pm, Mon-Fri, giving you 20 hours of flex time, more than enough to miss a day or 2 and make up the time.

Wow! But is it really? You’re still working your personal life in and around work. True, it can create a balance but it doesn’t reflect where our priorities really are (assumably). Why do we work? We work to pay for the necessities in life, +extras, that can raise the quality of our lives. So for analyzing purposes, let’s say the poverty line of income is the minimum needed for the necessities and anything above that raises your quality of life. Then let’s define a comfortable quality of life that begins when you are not working Paycheck to Paycheck, meaning you consistently have a positive bank balance with all bills paid on time, including groceries. Are you starting to see how complicated this topic is? Everyone has a different amount that defines a comfortable living. Everyone’s situation is different. People have a varying number of people who depend on them, varying amounts of debt, and a varying amount of cost of living, or inflation, specific to where they live (and no, not everyone can just pack up and move to a cheaper area). All these can depend on past economic hardship, the health and circumstance of their family, education. (I met a 20 year old kid, with a high school diploma, who honestly thought that the direction of ‘North’ was towards the sky.) 

Ultimately work/life balance is not scheduling hours at all but doing what you can, when you can, for both work and life. It’s not a balance, it’s harmony. It takes trust.