why people don't lead balanced lives

BEFORE we discuss strategies you can use to rebalance your life, it's worth trying to work out why people are so quick to notice that their work/life balance is not as they would like it to be, but so slow in acting to try to change it. What holds us back? Lack of motivation? Fear? Insecurity? A sense that there is nothing that can be done?

the whinge/action discrepancy

In most areas of life, once a problem is identified, action is taken to fix it. If you open the fridge and find the ice-cream has melted, you ring the fridge fixer. At work whenever a problem is identified — 'a client says their truckload of widgets didn't arrive' — steps are immediately taken to rectify it. If you had a sore tooth and the pain was diminishing your quality of life, you would be in the dentist's waiting room reading last century's magazines as soon as you could get an appointment. Why, then, do we allow work/life balance problems, which also diminish our quality of life, to persist year after year?

There are many reasons why the idea of addressing work/life balance may not initially be attractive. You may love your job, and enjoy spending lots of time doing it. You may believe that all this talk of work/life balance is all very nice, but you damn well need the money that only working long hours can provide. You may believe that it is impossible to do your job properly unless you work long hours. You may even think that the hours you work are, all things considered, quite reasonable, given that in return you get a decent whack of money.

Let's deal firstly with some of the perceived obstacles that prevent people from examining and adjusting their work/life balance and how to overcome them. Then we'll examine the benefits of embarking on an in-depth examination of your circumstances, and discuss how making some changes to your life could actually make it better. After that, we'll go on to discuss some of the changes you can make that could improve your work/life balance.

obstacles to achieving work/life balance (and how to overcome them)

there's nothing i can do

One reason many people continue to lead unbalanced lives is that they believe that there is nothing they can do to change their circumstances. They may feel trapped by the demands of their job, or by their employer's attitude, or by the financial demands on them to support themselves and their family.

If someone says their work hours are out of their control and they are completely unable to do anything, it allows them to take on the longsuffering air of the hard-working martyr and to feel good about themselves for being a noble, self-sacrificing provider. But it's very rarely the case that things have to be this way. If, for example, you are employed in a factory working fixed-term shifts set by a machine, and you need all the money you earn to support yourself and your family, and it is impossible to find another job with different conditions, then yes, the whole thing may be out of your control. But landscape gardeners, lawyers, doctors, sales executives, plumbers, real estate agents, public servants and IT professionals who say their work hours are completely out of their control are being disingenuous. If you really want to change, there is usually a way. That may sound glib, but later we will look at ways you can introduce work/life balance strategies into even workplaces that look like they have set, rigid conditions. Even if reducing your income is completely non-negotiable, there are still many things you can do to improve your work/life balance.

The idea that there is nothing you can do to change your work/life balance is rarely correct.

it's not my fault i'm important

Another objection to examining balance is the belief that if you worked fewer hours it would be impossible to do your job properly. Some believe that, given the type of job they have, the number of hours they work is inevitable and unchangeable. They think, 'Yes, ideally I would like to work fewer hours but because I am a doctor/mechanic/IT person/hang-gliding instructor, unfortunately it's just not possible. The fact is that in my job, you just have to work a 45-/55-/65hour week and that, tragically, is just the way the world is.'

Again, there are some jobs for which this is true. If your productivity is fixed by forces outside your control — for example, if you work on a production line where you can only work as fast as the machine lets you, or if your job has fixed-term shifts such as waitressing or nursing — then, yes, it may be difficult to reduce the hours you work and still do the job. All you may be able to do is to drop a shift and consequently reduce your income. Unfortunately for those in this situation the whole work/life balance equation may come down to the fact that you can only work fewer hours if you forgo some income.

However, most jobs are not that rigid. Most jobs give employees some control over their own productivity and enforce less than utterly rigid work hours. If you are in a job where you have some control over your productivity — that is, where if you work more efficiently and intensely you can get more done in an hour than if you slack off and take it easy — and you are not on a rigidly enforced shift system, then there are strategies you can adopt that can improve your work/life balance without affecting your income.

Many people say that their job is a demanding one with many responsibilities and that it would not be possible to do it in less than a nine- or 10-hour day. To deny even the possibility that by becoming more efficient and productive you could get the same amount done in less time (and hence go home earlier) is foolish and usually wrong. When a company calls in management consultants, they conduct a rigorous and thorough examination of the way everything is done, analyse the results and inevitably find ways that things could be done more efficiently. If you can rigorously analyse the way you spend your own work time, it is almost inevitable that you will find ways in which you can do more in less time, and so reduce your work hours without this having any negative effect on your job or income.

There's a psychological hurdle we need to clear here.

Part of the reason we believe that we couldn't possibly spend less time at work without the whole place falling apart is that we like to feel important.

That's why people ring work when they go on holidays. The idea that we are not indispensable can be horrifying. Well, get used to it. You're not indispensable. No one is. High-up important...