Simon Sinek critiques the conventional idea of "work-life balance," arguing that treating work and personal life as opposing forces is misguided. He advocates for work-life integration—making work and personal life smooth and interchangeable—illustrated with personal anecdotes (duvet days, flexible scheduling, taking afternoons for family or exercise).
So I am uncomfortable with this concept of work life balance.
Because balance is achieved with two opposing forces. And why should work and life be in opposition? Right? And I don't think there's. If you don't have work life balance, if you're struggling to find work life balance, no amount of yoga will fix that, right? Taking off an extra week of vacation. And by the way, vacation means you're not working on the beach. That's just telecommuting from a beach.
But I believe in.
That you're able to build a life where work and personal life become.
Not only, say, interchangeable, but smooth. And what I mean by that is they're not necessarily confined by hours in a day, but rather where I choose to give effort. So, for example, if it's 4 o' clock in the afternoon, technically part of the workday, and you're hankering for a run because it's a day like this, you go for a run, like that's, you know. And one of the, one of the mistakes that I've made was treating things that are important to my mind, my body, my spirit as something that I'm supposed, only supposed to do off hours or on weekends. But just like, I can't decide when I have an idea. Sometimes it's on Saturday and sometimes it's in the evening. I also can't decide when I need a break. Sometimes it's something I feel, not something I plan for. And so we've gotten really good. It's imperfect, you know, sometimes responsibility takes precedence. But we have gotten really good in our little company that if somebody wants to take an afternoon to be with their kids, they put in their calendar. With my kids, a long time ago, I used to have, when I had a different form of business, before all of this stuff, we used to have things called duvet days, which I can't remember. We had like five duvet days a year or something. And a duvet day was you wake up in the morning, you just don't want to come to work, you're totally healthy, or it's a beautiful day and I just would rather go to the beach. So you'd call up and leave a message at 8 o' clock in the morning or 7 o' clock in the morning, like, hey, I'm taking a duvet day, I'll see you tomorrow. And no one would bother you, right? And people like, that's amazing that you do that, Simon. I'm like, people are doing that anyway. It's called, hey, I think I have a 24 hour bug. I'm not going to be at work today and they go to the beach, so just call it out.
Schedule time at the gym in the middle of the day, if that's when you like working out. And I just found the more seamless that we can make work and life, the more we start to enjoy both more because they're not opposing.
