Balance Sucks
How many times have I encouraged hard work?
How many times have I encouraged rest?
I stand convicted of contradictory commentary and I am here to draw a line in the sand.
There is no such thing as “work life balance”.
Balance sucks!
History of “Impact Thought”
The September 22nd, 2020 edition of E-Impact addressed a strong mission and business - this takes hard work. But, E-Impact 115 said that creativity is limited without rest.
Are you thinking about impact?
E-Impact 30 told you that hard work makes you lucky. But, E-Impact 113 mentioned that we all have a dormant period.
I’m human. It’s hard to admit fault and just move on. I must provide some justification.
The fact is, you wouldn’t be reading this blog and I wouldn’t be typing it if I didn’t want to make a positive impact in the world. I’m not “The Generosity Guy” because I think giving is a waste of time. I believe it’s needed in our world and there is a deep drive to make that known.
The history of E-Impact shows that we’ve thought deeply about the importance of kindness, giving, and service. We’ve beat it up so much that maybe we need to take a step back and reevaluate our thought processes.
There’s No Self Made Impact
Jason Peterson from Feed Off Fear told us on Speaking of Impact episode 100 (what a milestone that was!) there is no such thing as a “self-made” person.
While that might lead you to a community recreational thought process, it’s really a motivation to find the right work environment. Realistically, in order to accomplish great things, you have to work hard. Two things come to mind:
Work itself can’t suck.
You have to ignore the temptation to avoid certain things that do.
Good people in your circle will help you address each of these points.
“Work”
What is work, really?
activity involving mental or physical effort done in order to achieve a purpose or result.
The formal definition says nothing about enjoyability or desire. It’s just activity for a purpose.
At the risk of sparking a far-reaching tangent, this is why I think having a strong purpose is such an important thing. It makes your work meaningful.
Okay, no tangent - promise.
Colloquially, work has become almost a derogatory term.
“I have to work, ugh.”
“Sorry, I can’t go because I work that day.”
“When do you get off work so we can go to the party?”
“Ha! You have to work while I’m off for the weekend.”
It’s a shame that society has developed this scenario. I think it has something to do with extremely driven people (for the right or wrong reasons) employee people, promise them money, and push them to do things that they don’t find purpose behind. In an alternate mode, The Impactmaker Movement seeks to hire and inspire.
So…
Is your work similar to today’s definition?
Or, is it like the traditional one?
Hopefully, the majority of it is like the latter and the former is just something of which you’re aware.
Putting in Work
I could have referenced numerous sports related entries in the historical section above. I didn’t. But I must at least bring up the topic now.
Part of the reason I enjoyed sports growing up (and exercise still to this day) is that it is a challenge and provides some sort of goal to reach towards. If someone was playing really well in a game or practice, we would say, “He’s putting in work.”.
In other words, if you were being successful, you were working. There is great meaning behind that statement whether us young athletes knew that or not.
Working alone (not by yourself, by itself) is success. And so hard work, is that much more successful.
The rest and celebration of your wins that I have referenced before are not a substitute for hard work. They are actually a compliment. If you do them right, you can truly put in your best work.
Balance Vs. Harmony
This is a realistic scale of time. Seeking work life balance is a losing proposition. I prefer the term work life harmony. I first heard it from Andrew Tarvin back on Speaking of Impact episode 20.
Don’t ever expect a high achieving life to spread time and effort evenly across every area of life. The three most important areas of my life are faith, family, and finances. I know different seasons of life include different distributions.
Balance sucks because it will give you a false sense of security. It gives you enough time and effort on all areas but prioritizes nothing. It commits you to things more than you want to be. It limits your upside.
I feel comfortable making those points because I don’t expect you to neglect any of the important areas of your life. I’m also prepared to argue that no matter how strong your purpose, there are enough distractions these days to throw off your balance or harmony.
Adjustments
The first thing that you can do to address your work life harmony is to minimize the distractions. Track your time (the mental effort will follow) doing things that just aren’t productive. Watching Netflix can qualify as productive if it’s part of the designated recharge time that you need. If not, cut it out. Is it a random escape or a scheduled break?
Cut out anything that you do “instead” of something else that needs to be done. For example, I know I have to mow the lawn after I write this. It doesn’t need to be mowed immediately, but it needs to be done. I could finish typing this and “rabbit hole” on TikTok, or I could get out there and mow. I have other things that will bring me much more joy and effective rest than watching ten second blooper videos (four Major League Baseball games today!).
Make the simple adjustments first and I think you’d be surprised how much more time you have in your day to be productive and enjoy the things that are most meaningful to you.
After cutting out the wasteful things, you have to prioritize the meaningful things. As mentioned above, different seasons of life will have a different order. Expect things to be out of balance but direct them to be in harmony.
You may need to spend some extra time on your impact project if you want it to be world class. That’s great. Make sure that your family time is scheduled, highly intentional, and distraction free.
After prioritization comes delegation. This is an advanced tactic I learned in business. Every company, impact project, non-profit organization, and even small family has necessary “evils”. I suppose mowing the lawn is one of them. An option for my wife and I is to pay someone to do the lawn. We choose not to do that but if I felt it was taking away from the priorities, I would hire someone.
Consider the things in every area of life that you can outsource. Professionals can hire an assistant. Executive Directors can hire a development officer. Families can pay a neighborhood kid to mow the lawn (now that’s a great idea!).
Outliers
It’s over ten years old now but still holds up. Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell is one of my favorite texts. It states that it takes 10,000 hours to become an expert at something. I once did the math on my time spent working at my previous employer and determined that I spent well over 30,000 hours at work.
I can’t say it makes me an expert three times over but it tells me something about what it takes to have success. Admittedly, towards the end of my career there, I had experienced some mission drift. My purpose was a bit off and so was my work life harmony.
It took some ten hour days and plenty of weekends to become an outlier. Sadly, I ended up “lying out” in a place I didn’t want to. That doesn’t mean I shouldn’t have put in the hard work. I should have put in different work at a certain point. I believe I had the proper harmony early in that career but things change in life.
Impactmakers are bound to be outliers. The key is making sure you stay harmonious with your purpose in your current season. Don’t wait too long to make adjustments.
The Community
The Impactmaker Movement is a community of people that want to do good in the world and will work hard for it. It’s full of multi-talented people with a wide reaching diversity of culture and thought. This is great news for all that we need to do to be successful.
I encourage you to tap into the resources of everyone that we share this bond with. The “work” that we do can be so fulfilling and doing it together is even better. The things that aren’t quite as joyful to you are joyful to someone else. Help others and they’ll help you.
Hold each other accountable and affirm each other’s gifts. Be generous (you know it’s contagious) and compassionate. Balancing your life may suck but harmonizing a community is amazing.
TLDR
I know these blog entries aren’t the quickest of reads and so I don’t often find it necessary to summarize the points in their entirety. You’ve read this far so I’d assume you’re taking in the information. In this case though, the three adjustments are above all the other points.
If you’ve made it to this point just by skimming or scrolling, take these points:
Cut - stop wasting time on non-joyful distractions
Prioritize - prioritize the most meaningful things
Delegate - delegate the necessary non-joyful tasks
Do this in community and find the harmony we all need to make the biggest impact we can.