The Truth About Your Work-Life Balance — Hint: It’s Unbalanced AF
Work-life balance has become a buzzword as we strive to find a way to navigate our personal and professional lives. Achieving a healthy work-life balance is essential to reducing stress, preventing burnout, and improving overall well-being. But how do you find the balance?
Capitalist America wants you to categorize your basic human needs as personal time, but you should only be using personal time to live life.
In order to achieve a true work-life balance, we need to introduce a new category: neutral, physiological, or basic human needs. The daily tasks of maintaining a state of aliveness that would traditionally fall under the life category should have a category on its own. Think foundation level of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Human needs include daily tasks like sleeping, eating, showering, doing chores, and using the toilet. Although the tool below doesn’t separate tasks into categories, you can use it to see where your time is going and figure out where to shift your attention.
For me, my human needs come to around 4200 hours per year, if I get a full 8 hours of sleep each night and don’t have an IBS flare-up. With a year adding up to 8760 total hours, I spend at least 44% of my time maintaining my aliveness. If I work 40-hour weeks, I spend 2,080 hours per year on the clock, which is 24% of my time. This leaves 32% of my time to living life. This can be more or less for you depending on many factors — responsibilities, health, wealth, location, culture, and so on. Since I don’t have kids yet, I still have a large percentage of my time left over for my life category.
When I worked in an office, I had to drive 1 hour to and from work, which is 10 hours per week or 520 hours per year. This would have made my work time feel closer to 30% than 24%. The ratio would have been 22% personal to 30% work which is not how I wanted to live. This is why remote and hybrid work schedules are such a refreshing change from the COVID-19 pandemic. Those few hours can add up over time, and slowly deteriorate employees’ overall wellness if they don’t have enough time to truly live and reach the top of Maslow’s Hierarchy. It’s the difference between just getting by and thriving with joy.
So what would have been considered 76% of my personal time is really only 32%. I’m no mathematician, but that’s a more ideal percentage in relation to the 24% reserved for work. It’s only once you subtract time for basic human needs that you find your ideal work-life balance.
What does your ratio look like? Are you giving yourself enough time to live?
