Work Life Balance is a Myth, Work Life Sequencing is What is Important

I have the great fortune to serve as a coach for a number of hard working professionals. Every day I get a chance to hear their joys, successes, fears and longings. By far the most consistent challenge I hear from them is their inability to balance the modern demands of work life with personal life. These are successful, committed and resourceful people who are dedicated to their careers. They are willing to put in the time and effort to be successful. Yet, they are also spouses and parents and sons and daughters that have many familial demands on their time. They consistently tell me that, “life feels out of balance”, or “I feel like I am letting someone down in my life”, or “I never seem to be at the right place at the right time”, or “I feel guilty for staying late at the office or feel guilty for going to my daughter’s volleyball game. I can never win when I am torn in these ways.” These are very real feelings of concern and emotion that eats at so many of us and is a consequence of our modern day working world. However, I believe there is a much better way to think about the constant juggling of our modern work and life priorities.

Instead of considering work life balance as the ultimate goal, we must reconceptualize the issue as not one of balance, but one of sequencing. Balance requires precision, like a tightrope walker where the slightest deviation is likely to throw us off the high wire act of our lives. Balance implies a teeter totter with us as fulcrum that has to balance two crushing weights in our lives that constantly seem to be weighing us down too heavily in one direction.

Sequencing however, allows us an entirely different perspective on these demands. Sequencing assumes that perfect balance is impossible. Instead, sequencing allows us to respond with our full selves with the acknowledgment that we can not be two places at one time. Sequencing requires us to enlist our family, our work colleagues or others in our lives to help us cover for the areas of our life that we need to deemphasize in the moment, day or week. Usually, we know that this next week is going to be a big work week with a big deadline coming up. We can let our family and loved ones know that we are working toward a big presentation and that is going to require more time at the office and it will be hard to pick up the kids after work this week. Or that next week, we have a medical appointment, a parent teacher conference and a community event that will take some time and focus away from work so I may be taking a longer lunch hour today.

This is the way the real world works and instead of requiring us the individual to solve my balance problem, enlists others in our cause for better sequencing. It allows us to ask for help if we need it, or simple understanding from our fellow associates or family members if that is all we need. It allows us the reach out a helping hand to say, “I can cover that for you” or “we can get a babysitter for that time” and spreads the responsibility across our entire web of relationships. Doing so also allows us to be tapped to assist others in the same way by our work colleagues or family members who need help when their sequencing gets stretched hard in one direction. Sequencing does assume that this more singular focus will not last for extended periods of time and that at some reasonable time things will be change and be stretched in another direction.

Professor Ron Heifetz, author Leadership Without Easy Answers, offers us this wisdom…”Leadership is about letting people down at a rate they can absorb.” To me, this means that you have developed enough strong relationships and built trust with your work family or home family enough that they trust you when you come to them with a work-life sequencing problem. Having built these deep relationships, you tap them on occasion to assist you in those moments, days or weeks when you get stretched hard in one direction of another. Relying on the entire team to help pick up the slack allows us to give our full attention to the task at hand and likely finish more quickly and effectively. Work-life sequencing also relieves us of always feeling guilty that we are missing something or letting someone we care about down. It acknowledges the reality that the modern demands of our fast paced lives requires a team of assistants to help us with these challenges and frees us up to share the responsibility for the other parts of our lives that are being momentarily deemphasized.

Believing that you are fully responsible for balancing all of the world’s demands on your shoulders alone is unhelpful. Even heroic Atlas from Greek mythology failed in this endeavor. Work life balance is not the target you should be aiming for. Proper work life sequencing should be the goal. If you end aiming for the wrong target, when you eventually hit it, the feeling is momentary and elusive. However, sequencing acknowledges that your priorities and demands are constantly in flux and that you and your team need to rise and meet them on a daily and sometimes hourly basis.

When I present this perspective to my coaching clients, they find it helpful and have a feeling of great relief. They have friends at work that can help them when their child gets sick, they have spouses or neighbors or other family members that can pitch hit for them when a work emergency arises. By thinking of these issues as sequencing issues rather than balance issues, we can get of walking the tightrope of our lives and back to scheduling ourselves where we are most needed. In doing so, we give our selves time and space to be fully present where we are most critically needed in that moment. This perspective change assists us in that effort.

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