Early in my career, I would come home from work, say hello to my wife and kids, and almost immediately open my laptop. My kids were four and one at the time. I had already been gone most of the day, usually working eight to ten hours, plus the commute. Yet somehow, sitting at home answering email felt like the responsible thing to do.
Eventually my wife pointed out the obvious: I had worked all day, and now I was home working some more. She had a point. I changed my routine. And like many of us would do, I would come home, spend time with the family, eat dinner, help put the kids to bed, and then open the computer again around 10 p.m.
Problem solved, right? Not exactly. I had not fixed my work-life problem. I had just moved the work.
Teetering on the Edge
That period of my life eventually sent me down a research path that became the focus of my doctoral work. I wanted to understand why so many of us struggle with something we have been told for decades should be achievable: work-life balance. I eventually came to a pretty simple conclusion. Balance is the wrong goal.
Think about what balance requires: stability. Now think about your actual life. One week everything is relatively calm. The next week a major project lands at work, someone gets sick, your kid joins a team, a parent needs help, you get promoted, you lose a job, or an opportunity comes along that you genuinely want.
There goes the balance, not because you are doing life wrong, but because life moved.
When Work Happens Everywhere
Work-life integration was supposed to be an improvement. Instead of trying to keep work and life on opposite sides of a scale, we could blend them. There are certainly benefits to flexibility, but there is a catch. When work can happen anywhere, it has a way of happening everywhere.
The laptop and phone follows us to the kitchen. Email follows us to the couch. A message from the boss shows up while we are sitting in the bleachers at our kid’s game. Suddenly it is 7:45 at night, you are answering an email, and you cannot remember exactly when the workday ended.
On Becoming Unbalanced
I think there is a more useful way to approach all of this: stop trying to balance your life and start negotiating it.
Negotiation begins with reality. Your time is finite. Your energy is finite. Your money has limits. Your responsibilities are real. Meanwhile, the number of things you could do, should do, want to do, or are being asked to do can feel almost infinite.
That means every yes comes with a no somewhere else. If I say yes to another committee, I am not merely adding a meeting to my calendar. I am spending time I cannot spend somewhere else. A promotion may bring more money and opportunity while also requiring travel or longer hours. Coaching my kid’s team may be incredibly meaningful and still mean something else has to move.
We often evaluate the thing we are saying yes to, but not what the yes will cost.
Mindset, Skill Set, Reset
So how do you negotiate instead?
- Start with your mindset. Look at the life you have now, not the life you think you are supposed to have. What matters in this particular season? What has changed? What are you still prioritizing because it mattered three years ago?
- Then look at your skill set. Sometimes the issue is not simply that we have too much work. It is that the work takes too much of us. If email consumes half your morning, if every meeting gets scheduled for an hour, or if a task takes three hours because you have never learned a faster way to do it, you may be spending time where developing more competence could create a margin.
- Finally, reset. This is the part people miss because a successful negotiation is not permanent. You may create a routine that works beautifully this year and makes absolutely no sense next year. The birth of a child, a new job, an aging parent, a health issue, a financial change, or simply a change in what you care about can alter the entire equation. Renegotiating does not mean the original decision failed. It means the circumstances changed.
Be Ready to Revise
Some circumstances cannot be negotiated away. You may need the paycheck. You may be caring for someone who needs you. Your employer may control more of your schedule than you would like. Work-life negotiation is not pretending every option is available. It is becoming clearer about the options you actually have and more intentional about the choices you can make within those constraints.
That is very different from trying to engineer the perfect schedule. People are not machines. Eight hours of work, eight hours of sleep, and eight hours of life sounds tidy until an actual human life gets involved.
So, I have mostly stopped asking people whether their work and life are balanced. I think there is a better question: What in your life needs to be renegotiated because the circumstances have changed?
Then look at your calendar. The answer may already be there.
Written by Dr. Chris Mullen.
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