8. Work/Life Integration

Webster’s dictionary defines balance as “a beam that is supported freely in the center and has two pans of equal weight suspended from its ends.” It’s succinct and to the point. Now apply that to the phrase “work/life balance.” It implies that the two things, work and life, can be made to become of equal weight, and having achieved that you can get to a point where they balance.

I’ve been working ever since I left school more than 30 years ago. I have had jobs that I hated, jobs that left me exhausted, and jobs that I couldn’t wait to get to every day. The one thing I have never had is a job that carried equal weight to the rest of my life. My children, my partner—those are the things that are important to me. Those things will always outweigh work in my life.

I understand that for some people their careers are incredibly important, and finding a way to ensure that they spend equal amounts of time and energy on both their personal lives and their professional lives is a goal that they strive for on a daily basis. I’ve seen a lot of professionals take on this challenge, but I’ve yet to see any of them successfully manage it. There might be brief moments where they achieve some measure of equilibrium, but for the most part that is an illusion, mostly borne from the fact that they are too exhausted from trying to get everything in balance.

However, the demarcation between work and life is perhaps at the root of the balancing act that so many attempt and yet fail at. Can you ever truly achieve a balance between two things that are unequal in your own perception?

As I discussed in the last chapter, the level of technology we have achieved in today’s world means that we are always connected. It means that many of us have to make a conscious effort to be disconnected, whereas only a few years ago the reverse was true. We would have to make an effort to remember to check email; now we have to make a conscious effort to remember to check for physical mail.

Achieving a balance between two different areas of your life entails the ability to clearly classify activities that fall into those two areas. For example, when you pick up your cell phone that has both work and personal email accounts on it, can you only check one or the other? During working hours, are you going to ignore personal messages? During “nonworking” hours, are you only going to read personal messages?

If you bring your laptop home from the office, are you seriously going to be able to let it sit in the bag it was carried home in, or are you going to power it up to finish off that project? Defining what constitutes work hours and what constitutes life hours is a complex issue for many individuals. The pull of unfinished work, that gnawing at the back of your mind that reminds you that it will be waiting for you in the morning competes for attention with your child’s homework, your partner’s retelling of their day, a favorite television show, a family meal, your dog that needs walking, and a million other “life” tasks.

To prioritize items you first have to rank them in some kind of order. Usually this takes the form of an order of importance. When you divide the two realms, work and life, the prioritization becomes a little easier. Your child’s homework assignment can be ranked above walking the dog, helping your partner prepare the evening meal can be ranked above watching TV, and so on. Likewise with work tasks, you know which tasks need to take precedence for your job to be completed effectively. Now how do you match those two lists to achieve balance?

Does completing that work task take precedence, carry more weight, or come higher on the list of priorities than helping your child with their homework? Is it more important to help prepare dinner than to check work email for that one item you need to finish the day’s work tasks?

These are all, of course, personal decisions. I’m certainly not going to try and tell you what your priorities should be. The point is to illustrate just how hard making those types of decisions can be. I certainly can’t imagine trying to prioritize between work tasks and spending time with a child.

Some people find these decisions to be “sacrifice” based. You sacrifice time with your child now so that you can ensure their future. I can see the justification in that, although the concept seems a little like borrowing from one account to pay a bill owed from another. Of course, different cultures view time with family, time spent at work, and the decisions that have to be made about which to prioritize differently. In some cultures, the notion of sacrificing time with family is completely alien; in others it is not even considered a sacrifice.

Whether you view it as a sacrifice, an opportunity cost, or as a natural order of things, there can be no doubt that we, as an ordinary human beings, cannot be in two places at once and that most of us find it extremely difficult to focus our attention on more than one task at a time. Can you be really present with your partner and respond to emails? Can you help your child with homework and at the same time be on a conference call?

Jordan Grafman, chief of the Cognitive Neuroscience Section at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), is quoted as saying:

You’re doing more than one thing, but you’re ordering them and deciding which one to do at any one time.

In other words, our attempt at multitasking is really a prioritization of actions. The myth of multitasking has increased with the popular culture acceptance of the “geek,” at least in Western societies. A term that was originally derogatory is now “cool,” and along with it the associated faux-technical knowledge and language of the geek. Multitasking originated as a computer term, referring to the way in which early computers appeared to be able to manage more than one calculation at a time. This was also only an appearance provided because of the speed at which the calculations were performed. Human beings are not capable of this level of speed.

Perhaps the most common example of multitasking, and one that has led to an increasing number of jurisdictions banning the practice, is that of texting and driving. The argument that being able to text and drive was the same multitasking process as driving while holding a conversation or driving and listening to the radio was discounted, and it is now illegal to text and drive or, in fact, use any of the non-voice-based applications on a smartphone while driving.

So if we, as a society, accept that we are not able to safely operate a vehicle and use a phone at the same time, why do we insist that we are able to divide our attention in ways that, although less hazardous, can still damage us, if only at the relationship level? Our hubris regarding the ability we think we have to multitask has, in my opinion, led to the type of thinking that leads us to believe we are capable of balancing work and life.

Let me provide another example. Often someone who has a lot of tasks to complete at the same time is said to have “a lot of plates spinning at once.” The phrase relates to the circus or street performer act of placing plates on the top of flexible poles and using the flexibility of the poles to keep the plates spinning at the top so that they don’t fall to the ground and break.

However, the performer only has one pair of eyes and one pair of hands. So their success is determined by their ability to see which plates are slowing down and increase the spin of those that need it, while quickly moving to the next set of plates. At best, the performer can spin two plates at the same time. The overall effect maybe that they have a dozen plates spinning at once but in fact they are rapidly moving from one set of plates to the next. Instead of multitasking, they are prioritizing based on need; they are judging which plate is about fall.

Many of us apply this process to our work lives and indeed our personal lives. The failure comes when we try and manage both lives using the same process. It is simply not possible to manage two different lives in this way, at least in my experience.

So if a work/life balance is impossible to achieve, what is the solution?

That can be a hard concept for some people to adjust to. How can work be as important as home? Or email as important as a child’s homework? In a literal sense, as I’ve already mentioned in this chapter, I don’t think they are. However, in terms of integrating what was previously considered two separate lives into one whole, they become equal.

Instead of trying to apportion a weight or value to a task (for example, walking the dog is a lower priority than answering work email), integration means that we apportion time throughout our day to attend to various tasks that need doing. The first loss after successfully transitioning to a whole life integration is guilt.

How many times have you felt guilty because you couldn’t play with your child because you were working on a project at home? How many times have you had to skip a social arrangement with friends because you had to deal with emails? If you have been working any length of time, I would venture to say that you have experienced a situation like this at least once, and of course felt the associated guilt that goes with making that prioritization.

By not making those tradeoffs, by not trying to prioritize one task over another in terms of importance, you are less likely to feel guilty about which task you choose to do. Less guilt, less stress; less stress, improved efficiency. Almost sounds too good to be true—and you know what they say about things that sound too good to be true, right?

I am not suggesting that this is some secret, never-before-revealed method of achieving a stress-free life. If you have that secret, please share it with me! What I am suggesting is that by abandoning the idea of prioritizing tasks based on their perceived importance and moving to a new paradigm of integrating tasks into the day, you can simplify your life and reduce the guilt and stress of managing your day.

In reality, this is really only possible for the Out of Office worker. Those workers who are in-office only are stuck with the value-based prioritization method that so many of us are familiar with. This is just another benefit of the Out of Office work style.

How you utilize time changes completely when you are working Out of Office. There are, of course, a few constraints, but for the most part they are conventions rather than necessities. I first started to realize this when working for a company that had its headquarters in India. Because of the time difference of 10.5 hours between us, it was necessary for the whole team to be flexible. For the most part, my colleagues in India worked a U.S.-based shift. However, that wasn’t always possible, nor was it practical, and at times I would need to be available to them during their daytime, which corresponds to evening or early morning in the U.S.

Adjusting my working day to meet the needs of my team meant that I was either up a lot earlier than my U.S.-based colleagues and clients or working a lot later. However, this time-shifting meant that I was able to complete tasks and still have my day ahead of me, even if it meant I was ready for bed earlier than usual.

By managing my own day, deciding what time to allocate to which tasks, I was freed from the chore of having to prioritize tasks based on value. Rather, I was able to decide that if, by 2 p.m. I needed to take a nap, then that was going to be okay because it fit into the timeline that I had allocated for myself. When you are solely based in-office, your day is mapped out for you. There is an expectation that you will be in the office at sometime between 7.30 a.m. and 9.30 a.m. and that you will leave at sometime between 5.00 p.m. and 7.00 p.m.

That makes it sound like everyone who works in an office considers it to be somewhat akin to a prison sentence, which of course is not the case, and I don’t mean to imply that because someone works in an office with a set timetable that they are drones and not free to set their own priorities. In fact, the opposite is true, but it is still setting priorities based on a value system—usually the value of a time-based deadline or based on the position in the organization of the person who set the task.

How often in your career have you encountered a situation where either yourself or colleagues have been confused by “changing priorities” because somewhere further up the chain of command someone decided that a new task had more value to the organization than a previously assigned one? There are times when it seems that there is a competition being engaged in by managers to see who can assign new values to tasks first, on a daily basis.

The product of this value-based decision making and priority setting is that people are faced with increasingly shortened deadlines, even unrealistic deadlines, and are being asked to produce work at a rate that is not sustainable, perhaps even giving the impression that they have been set up for failure. Although money is the lifeblood of any organization, whether for-profit or non-profit, time is the currency of people.

This is often where the conflict within organizations and within people themselves occurs. Work is, at its most basic level, the exchange of time for money. When you hire me to work for your organization, you are offering to exchange your money for my time. Of course, there are certain caveats included as part of that contract of exchange. For example, during the time that I trade for your money I will produce something that has value to you. This concept is true whether you work for an organization or yourself through clients.

It is my opinion that this is why we cannot successfully balance work and life. One is based on money and the other on time. At various points in our life, one or the other has greater value to us, but at no point do they ever have the same value.

When we are younger and just starting out on our careers, money holds a greater value than time. We are looking to establish ourselves in the world, perhaps to buy our first car or our first home, pay off student loans, or meet other financial obligations. As we grow older, perhaps have a family or develop other interests beyond just work, we increasingly value our time more. We want time to enjoy the fruit of our labors, as the old saying goes. So the equation has changed, where we once valued money more than time, we now value time more than money.

So we find ourselves in a position of unbalanced priorities. A business, on the other hand, being only a conceptual existence, only values that which provides continuity—money. Whether you are the CEO of a Fortune 500 company or the owner of a single-person small business, without money, without a steady cashflow, your business will cease to exist.

So if the organization values money and you switch your values between money and time, how can you balance or prioritize them? At the most basic of levels, the response is simply that without the job you won’t earn money, without money you won’t be able to afford to enjoy your time away from work, so work must be the priority.

It seems that many people come to the same conclusion; in fact, it seems almost an ingrained, accepted truth. In the U.S., people are persuaded that attending college is the most important step in securing their future. However, in doing so they often enter a ridiculous cycle. To attend college takes money, so they have two choices: Take longer to get their degree as they work to pay for the cost of college, or at least reduce the amount of money they will need to borrow to pay for it, or take on a large debt to pay for their education, a debt that will take them several decades to pay off.

So the joke becomes that a person should attend college so that they can secure a job that will allow them to pay off the debt they incurred by attending college! This seems a very circular arrangement and one that only appears to benefit the educational organizations and those providing the loans. I am not devaluing education by any means here, but again we are in a situation where we have placed value on time that is money based. A student agrees to exchange their time, time spent in learning, in return for paying an educational establishment with money they have borrowed. They are then in a position where they must exchange their time having left education to earn money so they can repay that loan. What would happen, what does happen, when they choose not to make that exchange?

Working Out of Office should be more than a change of location. Simply replacing the formal setting of an office with a home-based office, coffee shop, hotel room, or airport lounge isn’t fully embracing the entire concept, nor is it exploiting the full advantage that comes with this type of work style. To fully embrace the Out of Office work style requires a changing in thinking. It requires that you change how you approach the day and indeed the other units of time that we are so fond of using as reference points.

I no longer think in terms of a “work” week. There is no Monday to Friday with a weekend to demark the beginning and end of work. This is true of many Out of Office workers. Telecommuters who travel on Sunday evenings to be at a client site for Monday morning, for example, might take back those hours spent at an airport by not being available on a Friday afternoon.

But it goes far beyond that when you really start to embrace the new way of looking at time. If the concept of work tasks being bound by Monday to Friday is no longer relevant, that also means that family and pleasure time are no longer bound by the concept of the weekend. There is no more pressure to try and fit in family and friends and leisure into a 48-hour period, while at the same time dreading the arrival of Monday morning and wishing for just a few more hours of enjoyment.

One of my favorite authors, Douglas Adams, wrote in his humorous science-fiction book The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, “Time is an illusion, lunchtime doubly so.” I won’t try and explain the reason that one of his characters says this in the book, but the concept of time being an illusion is, for me, a truism.

I used to be tied to a wristwatch. I was lost without it. I still collect them and wear them for special occasions, but now they are more accessories than essentials. I will even wear a favorite watch if it has stopped if it goes with an outfit I am wearing. Its ability to tell me the time is no longer relevant to my decision to wear it or not. The mobile phone has replaced my watch; it tells me the time and reminds me of appointments if I need reminding. But on an average day, working from home, I will barely look at it for the time. We have several clocks in the house, and I’m sure you have some of the same ones—DVRs, kitchen appliances, and other devices that also provide a clock. I hardly register them. My day is not dominated by a timepiece, but rather by the flow of the day. That is not to say I am without the need to keep track of the day, but rather keeping track of it is more for the benefit of certain routines, such as feeding my cats—although they would hardly let me miss their meals quietly! Of course, there are client calls and meetings that have to be scheduled, and for those keeping track of time is important.

This is not some idyll that I have managed to create for myself, but rather a different system of life integration. Working is now as much a part of my daily life as eating, washing, cleaning, reading, entertainment, or any number of other ways I might allocate time. The time to do things is determined less by an opportunity cost model—the concept that if I do one thing, I am sacrificing the opportunity to do something else—and more by when I have completed one thing I will simply move to the next thing. The things might be work items or they might be leisure items. They might be consecutive or mingled.

When I first started working this way, it was hard to remain focused; at first it felt like I was using a reward-based system to determine my day. If I work on this, then I can do this pleasure thing. That strikes me as being a flawed system in much the same way as some diets allow cheat days. If you are cheating on a diet, then the food becomes a reward. If you are rewarding yourself with leisure time, you have resorted to measuring work and leisure as different types of time.

That can be borne out of a lack of enjoyment from your work, of course. For that there is only one cure—find something you love to do, then, as the saying goes, you will never work a day in your life. Perhaps that is the key to being the most successful Out of Office worker: You must love what you do. Certainly it is key to being able to fully integrate all types of time into one experience. If you begrudge the time you spend on a certain task and it becomes a chore, you will certainly view it as an opportunity cost.

There are tasks that I do with no relish; I would be lying if I tried to convince you otherwise. Scooping a full cat litter box at 6 a.m. while still trying to shake the sleep from my eyes is not exactly my idea of a fun time. However, it is not measured against the time I could have spent doing something else. It simply needs doing. It is one task in a day of tasks. Working Out of Office allows me to order those tasks into a day. Equally, there are work-based tasks I get no enjoyment from (invoicing, for example). Yes, it means I get paid, but the whole process of keeping accounts is not something I enjoy doing. I am certain that there are tasks in your job you would prefer not to do. However, if you view them as simply one task among many, the amount you dislike them declines or at least is balanced against the ones you do like.

Integration is about finding the right place in your routine for individual tasks. Some tasks that you undertake, especially those that are work focused, will have impacts on work colleagues. This means that they have to be undertaken and completed by a certain time. This is where the discipline I discussed early in the book comes into play—the discipline to complete tasks when they are due but also to not drift into the old way of thinking, of seeing one set of tasks as being work and the other set of tasks being pleasure.

There is a difference between a task having a due point in time and a task being exchanged for time. Many tasks are time sensitive or at least have a need-based element to them. Children, pets, even ourselves need to be fed at regular intervals. Laundry needs to be done. Your home needs to be cleaned. Groceries need to be bought. These tasks are all need based and to some extent or another time sensitive. Some you may enjoy, others you may not, but you do them nonetheless. The same applies to work tasks. Integration of these tasks into your daily timeline simply means that they are all completed at an appropriate point. It becomes less about what time of day they are completed and more about ensuring that they have been completed.

Having freed yourself from a time-constrained day, you become more imaginative about how and when to do tasks. If you share your life with others in a domestic situation, your flexibility will be tailored to suit all of you. You are probably not going to win any popularity prizes with your family if you decide that 2 a.m. is the best time of the day for you to vacuum your house. However, deciding that you will start work-related tasks at 6 a.m. instead of 8 a.m. may well have less of an impact on others around you and provide you with the opportunity to add more pleasure-related tasks to your day.

What might your day look like if you planned it out with less of a focus on a Monday-to-Friday, 8 a.m.-to-6 p.m. pattern and more of an open agenda? Being deliberate about integrating all the tasks you need to complete in a day ensures that not only do the tasks get completed but also that you have the opportunity to enjoy the Out of Office work style. For example, in talking with some people who are home based, I found that many had not considered taking their work-related tasks to alternate locations, unless they were meeting with someone. Taking a laptop to the park and completing work tasks there, followed by a walk, integrates exercise, relaxation, and work into one section of the day. Without planning that, though, it is all too easy to simply stay home, work during the day, and perhaps run to the store and grab some groceries, and then return home to complete more work tasks.

That isn’t really integration; it is still the segmentation that we are used to and to some extent trained to do. Those who are new to the Out of Office work style often feel guilty about having the freedom to integrate what was previously thought of as work into their whole life. They think in terms of themselves as being away from the office but still tied to it and the conventions it requires. Integration allows them to not feel that guilt, but there is a shift in thinking required before that freedom from guilt can happen.

Does your manager, boss, or client care that you completed a work task in the park and then went for a walk? No, in my experience, when it comes to remote workers, all anyone really cares about is that the work product is completed when needed. They prefer a “black box” approach. That is, they aren’t really interested in how something happens; they are more interested in the fact that it happens when it is needed.

If you are trusted, either by your organization or yourself, to be working Out of Office, then surely you are trusted enough to plan your days appropriately and still have the freedom to enjoy your time. How many hours have you wasted worrying about tasks that you didn’t complete because you traded that time for something else? A little discipline and forethought goes a long way in ensuring that you have time for everything and that the things that matter get done.

I can almost hear some of you reading this now saying that I obviously don’t work for your boss, your clients, or in your industry. Well, of course I don’t. I don’t know your life, or how you organize it. What I do know is that an increasing number of people are taking on the Out of Office work style but are doing so in a manner that means they are simply swapping locations and not changing the mindset that they bring with them.

This means that both they and the people they work with and for do not fully experience the benefits of this type of working. There are so many more benefits than simply being able to meet your child from the bus stop at the end of the school day or being able to pick up the groceries in the morning when the store is less busy. One of the biggest benefits I have seen among my peers is that once they have untethered themselves from a restricted way of approaching the Out of Office work style, their creativity increases. Because they are looking at a major part of their lives in a different manner, they start to look at other things with a different perspective.

The solutions that they create are different, more imaginative, sometimes more daring than those they previously had. After all, if you start thinking differently about something as major as how you spend your day, then surely it is reasonable to imagine you will apply that thinking to everything you tackle. Better solutions and more imaginative thinking benefits everyone; clients, organizations, co-workers all get to benefit from this different way of examining issues. Again, this should be part of the process when considering Out of Office working. Does the person, do you as an individual, feel capable of changing the way you approach tasks, the way you approach life?

For those who lack the flexibility of making a major change in their perspective, working Out of Office is most likely to remain simply a change in location and not really bring the full benefits of the work style with it. It becomes more about convenience, perhaps cost savings, and other considerations. This is where you then see team fragmentation, isolation, and a decline in productivity occur. Working Out of Office isn’t just a different way of working; it is a different way of thinking, a different way of considering what work, life, and time mean to a person. By accepting that the change of location is less important than the change of thinking, a person and the organization they are attached to become able to fully realize the benefits available to them from Out of Office working.

Applying this criteria, the ability to change an ingrained way of thinking of how work and life integrate can change the way in which an organization decides to select or even implement Out of Office working. First, change is hard—for both individuals and organizations. As I have already discussed in previous chapters, the most likely candidates for Out of Office working are likely to be more experienced workers, those who understand both the industry they work in and, if appropriate, the organization they work for. However, this also means that they are likely to have spent more time in the traditional, in-office environment and therefore have taken on the more traditional way of perceiving work and life. The question that needs to be asked is, can they change?

Just as importantly, can the organization change where necessary to accommodate the shift in thinking that the employees will bring who are working Out of Office. It is one thing to imagine that you want more creative thinking and more creative solutions within the organization, but is the organization ready to embrace them, to implement them, and can they be integrated with the way others who are still based in-office think? Just to clarify, here, I am not suggesting that those who are working in-office lack imagination or creativity. I am simply highlighting that when you encourage one group of people to start thinking differently than another group, it can become a point of conflict.

I encourage you to think about how you have spent your past few days: How did you allocate your tasks? Was it based on an exchange of time? Was it based on a prioritization based on money? Was it based on how those tasks fit best into your life?

If you aren’t happy with the way you have allocated your tasks, think about changing the way you do things. I am not providing a “blueprint” for happiness, or how your individual day should look. Only you can do that. Only you know your situation and the tasks that face you each day. I do really believe, however, that with a little creative thinking and the readiness to change how you view your tasks, you can achieve a much greater level of integration than you currently have.

I encourage you to stop trying to achieve a value-based balance in your life and instead integrate your whole life so that you can achieve more, do more, and experience more of the benefits of working Out of Office.