How to improve work life balance when you’ve lost your life to the job
You don’t love your life, but you don’t know how to change it. How, exactly, do you improve work life balance when your workload only increases?
You wake up and start working. You’ve forgotten what it’s like to have a life.
And anyway, this is how it’s done, right? If you are a credible professional, you join a demanding company that only accepts high-flyers, and you work to demonstrate your value.
This pattern continues with promotion after promotion until eventually you retire. Switching companies doesn’t change the pattern – you just repeat it at a higher level.
And not only do you repeat it, but you also model it, perpetuating the system from whence it sprung.
Hypothetically, if you used the last two years as the basis for your eulogy and stretched them out over the next 50 years, what would people remember you for?
Would you end your life with regrets or would you be happy that you gave your soul to work?
For those who can connect their personal mission to the organizational one, perhaps this level of work commitment is worth the sacrifice made in other areas of life.
Think for a moment about that sacrifice. What relationships are you forgoing? Are you missing opportunities? How many skills will you not learn? Which memories will you not make?
If you forecasted the rest of your life using your current work/life balance, how well would that life stack up to the life you wanted?
If that balance would create a well of regret that you’d like to avoid, there are 3 things you can do now to create a work/life balance and change your end-of-life outcome.
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Write your personal strategic plan.
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Redefine the metrics by which you measure yourself.
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Learn to set and hold boundaries.
Doing these three things will help you deliberately design your end-of-life outcome.
Firstly, you set your personal direction, independent of your organization. Knowing what you are working toward – your end of life meaning – will make it easier to intentionally decide what percentage of your life you want to dedicate to work.
Secondly, start measuring your progress holistically across your life, not just in the professional sphere. Set key indicators that measure your success by how you define success, which might look different than how it’s defined in your office.
Once you’ve plotted a holistic course for your life, and you’ve got a new system of metrics to help you evaluate your actions within this framework, start setting boundaries that honor your personal strategic plan.
Write your personal strategic plan.
Just like you set a strategic direction for your organization. Draft a strategic plan for yourself.
Your strategic plan should be based on your values and include three sections:
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Your current state – what is the history of you? How did you get to be where you are today?
This section forms the basis of your leadership story. As you write this, analyze what skills and what lessons you’ve gained from what you’ve experienced in life. What foundational pieces will you use to help you achieve your mission and objectives?
If the second step of your strategy feels daunting, spend some time work through the first step until you have the level of granularity to define your why. What are the highlights and defining moments that you use to make sense of your life? What do they tell you about who you are and what you want to bring to the world?
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Your future state – what is your vision & your mission statement? What are your objectives?
If you struggle to define your vision, go back the regrets that you saw writing your eulogy. Turn the absence, the lack, into positive statements of want. Follow your longing and discontent – it will tell you what you want to create in your life.
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Bridging the gap – what is your strategic plan to get from your current state to your future state?
What are your priorities and what actionable goals will you set to move toward your vision? Work backwards if necessary and set milestones against a timeline that will help you track your progress.
Redefine your metrics and change how you measure yourself.
Using your strategic plan, objectives, and milestones, define the key performance indicators that will signal you are achieving your personal strategic plan.
Evaluate your progress against them regularly, as you would for any program or project you are running. Adjust your course as needed to get back on track to achieve your goals.
You may find, however, that your personal strategic plan conflicts with your current professional ecosystem.
If the metrics that define success at work don’t help you get closer to the metrics that signal success in your life, you’ll need to decide which one is a priority for you.
This doesn’t have to be an either/or decision. You can continue working hard and performing excellently.
But your decision does have to give you an order of importance that you can use to guide your choices if your holistic life plan is incompatible with the demands of your job.
Unless the way we work gets overhauled, the organization will ask for your lifeblood, but is unlikely to offer you a lifeline.
Who will you choose?
Learn to set and hold boundaries
If you choose yourself and your holistic life plan, you will need to learn to set and hold boundaries.
This requires that you recognize the value you bring. For some of you, this will be an identity shift away from doing toward being.
Start tracking how you gave value. In the beginning you’ll still see a lot of doing-related evidence but try to also include ways of being.
Did someone seek you out to chat? If so, you have value for them. Note that down.
Did someone praise how you kept your calm or made them feel appreciated? This is evidence that how you showed up offered value.
Without a basic acceptance of your worth, you will struggle to hold boundaries even if you set them.
When you set them, remember you are setting healthy boundaries. These boundaries will help you avoid reaching the end of your life a hollow burnt out shell of a workaholic.
Healthy boundaries safeguard what’s acceptable for you. They prioritize what you defined in your personal strategic plan.
Boundaries do not mean that you are lazy or don’t want to work hard. In fact, if anything, they preserve your ability to keep giving.
That said, if you’ve set a precedent of “not a boundary in sight” with your organization, you are likely to get pushback.
Anyone who benefits from your lack of boundaries, will resist the change. Which is why it’s so important you have an inherent understanding of your worth.
How you communicate when you place the boundary will help the other party accept the change with greater ease.
If you are choosing to follow your strategic plan, you’ve shifted. You’ve made a policy change. As in the business world, policy changes are always communicated clearly in advance.
You are going to want to try to seek buy-in as well, though that may not always be forthcoming. Buy-in looks like explaining why and how and helping find solutions for unforeseen impacts.
You can get your life back. And you can very intentionally decide how you want to live, moving forward.
Typically, if you are in a state where you have lost yourself in work, this requires you make some hard choices.
Which is why you need a strategy to guide you, internally defined metrics to help you understand how you are really doing, and a strong sense of self-worth.
If you want a partner to help you draft your strategic plan, define your KPIs or help you see your worth, schedule a call with me!
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With gratitude to Christian Schloe for so beautifully illustrating The Balance between mind and heart. Find this and more here: https://society6.com/christianschloe