3 Myths About Work Life Balance & 5 Ways to Really Create It

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That's the part where we go wrong. We try to divide our time equally. We try to divide our money equally. We try to divide our attention equally. Right? It's impossible to equally divide your time between work and family. If you're working an eight to nine hour job and then you're spending three hours family in the evening, it can feel like it's not equal. It can feel like you're always working. Hey everyone. Welcome back to On Purpose, the number one health podcast in the world. Thanks to each and every single one of you that come back every week to listen, learn and grow. Now, whether you're cooking with, whether you're walking your dog, whether you're at the gym, whether you're catching a sunrise or a sunset, or you're driving in your car, I'm so grateful to be with you and I appreciate you so much for letting me into your world, for letting me into your life. I love the reaction when I bump into one of you on the streets or at an event or wherever we are and you give me a big hug and let me know that you listen to the podcast and this happened last week where Someone said to me, they said, jay, I feel like I know you, but you don't know me. And I said, you do know me. You do know me. I share so openly and vulnerably and honestly on the podcast. You do know me, and I can't wait to meet you, too. So thank you so much to everyone who's leaving reviews on the show, who's posting on Instagram and TikTok and Twitter. I'm seeing more and more posts about the show all the time. And today we're talking about something really important, something that I feel a lot of people are striving for. A lot of people are chasing, and a lot of people are pursuing. And the statistics show this as well. People are stressed. 65% of employees who now work from home say they are working longer hours. And so the thing that we're all chasing is work life balance. What I find really fascinating about this is that it's often our pursuit of an incomplete belief that creates more challenges in our life. Let me break that down. When we don't define or understand ideas, words and concepts and clearly, but then we still pursue them, we often end up somewhere we don't want to be. It's almost like going somewhere without being really clear on the coordinates, or you go somewhere but you don't get the zip code spot on. This happened to me probably about six months back now. I was going to meet one of my friends at his new office building, and my team had popped his address in my schedule, and. And so I went to that street. What I didn't realize is that they hadn't placed the exact number of the building. They had the building name and the street name, and it took me to the street, not that particular building. I ended up being still 30 minutes away because supposedly that street runs from LA all the way to Calabasas, right? From. From West Hollywood to Calabasas. And so what I find in life is often that we pursue words like success, we pursue words like wealth, we pursue words like security, we pursue words like stability, we pursue words like excitement. But we never took the time to define or understand what those words actually mean. And I believe that work life balance is one of those terms. It's a term that we've been saying for a long time. It's a term that we've heard for a long time. It's a term that seems to make sense, but I think the way we think about it doesn't always stack up. So I want to read for a second some of the definitions of the word balance and how, I think we interpret this word incorrectly, which leads us not finding balance. So balance is defined as an even distribution of weight, enabling someone or something to remain upright and steady. And even distribution. That's where the challenge comes in. We try to evenly distribute our time, we try to evenly distribute our money, we try to evenly distribute our energy. And the truth is that you can't evenly distribute it because there aren't enough hours in the day. Now another definition of balance is a condition in which different elements are equal. And that's the part where we go wrong. We try to divide our time equally, we try to divide our money equally, we try to divide our attention equally. And you can't do that, right? It's impossible to equally divide your time between work and family. If you're working an eight to nine hour job and then you're spending three hours with family in the evening, it can feel like it's not equal. It can feel like you're always working, right? And that's where those terms come about. You're always working, you're never at home. Are we always working? Are we never at home? That's not true. But because it's the majority, it feels like it. So because it's 75% of the day, it becomes 100%. Because we're trying to get to 50, 50. We're trying to get to equality. Now here's where the definition of balance actually improves. It says a condition in which different elements are equal or in the correct place. Proportions. That's the part I want to focus on. Correct proportions. We can create proportionate distribution in our life. We can't or we will struggle to create equal distribution in our life. And sometimes as we strive for equal and even distribution, we end up feeling really upset and disappointed, right? We end up feeling really, really like we're struggling. Now, I want to talk to you about five states that we need on any given day or any given week, throughout the day, throughout the week, throughout the month, throughout the year. We will need a different state at different times. And there's two things to note here. The first thing is you won't always have access to that state at that time, but you want to create space for that state. This will make a lot more sense as I start walking through it. So if you think about any activity you need to do, any task you need to do, anything you would like to do in a day, you need one of these five states in order to do it. Sometimes you need focus. Maybe it's a work Task, right? Maybe it's a big project, maybe it's a new product you're working on, a new service you're creating. You need a high level of focus. That's one state. But you don't need focus to do everything in your life. You don't need to be focused on everything. Focus can be draining. If someone said to you you need to be focused throughout the day, that could be highly exhausting. And maybe you're experiencing that. The second one is sometimes you just need high energy, which means you just need that raw enthusiasm and energy to get stuff. Right? The third state that you need is presence. This is a lighter form of focus, often in relationships, right? You don't need to be focused in a conversation. You need to be present in a conversation. Focus is a slightly different energy. Presence is a softer, more easy energy of being alert and aware. You then have planning. Sometimes you need to be in a planning state. You need to be in a state of thinking about the future, building for the future, trying to craft something for the future. And the fifth state is rest. Relaxation, calm. We all need in our life a state of rest, a state of refuel, a state of rebuild. So instead of trying to divide our time equally, which often creates many, many issues, instead of trying to divide our money equally, which also doesn't always work, we have to start thinking in how do I create schedules and plans that are focused on the state I need to do that in. So, for example, this comes with a level of awareness that we may not have if we haven't done this exercise. This is an activity that comes from the book when by Daniel Pink. He's been on the podcast. You can listen to his episode as well. We talked about this book and it's a book about the art of timing. And he talks about this exercise that we're about to do right now. And this exercise helps us find out what tasks we should do at different times of the day. The first thing you need to do in this is you need to write down your general bedtime and your general waking up time. So my General Bedtime is 10pm and my waking up time is 6am I try to sleep for eight hours. So I want you to write down yours. Now, you may work late, you may work early. What are yours? What's your bedtime? Write it down. And what is your wake up time? So mine's 10pm and 6am Write that down. Now write down your midpoint. What is the middle time in between those two? Mine is 2am, yours could be 2:30, it could be 5:30, it could be 1:30, it could be any of those. What is yours? What is your middle time between the two times? So 2am is four hours from 10pm and four hours from 6am So 2am now write that number down and listen very carefully. If your midpoint of sleep is 3:30am or earlier, you're known as what's called a lark. L A R K A lark. So I'm a lark because my midpoint is 2am, which is 3.30am or earlier. So if your time is 3.30am or earlier, you're a lark like me. Now, if your midpoint of sleep is 5:30am or later, you're probably an owl. That's the name given to you. So if your midpoint was 5:30am or later, you're known as an owl. And if your midpoint is somewhere in between, you're known as a third bird. So I want you to write down, are you a lark like me? Because Your midpoint is 3:30am or earlier. Are you an owl? Which means your midpoint is 5:30am or later. And if you're between those two, then you're a third bird. And now I'm going to share some really interesting information about when you're able to do certain tasks better. And I think this is the balance we're looking for. The balance we want is how can I be at my best when I'm with my family and when I'm at work? That's really the balance we're looking for. What we don't want is I spend an equal amount of time at work and an equal amount of time at home. But I'm not at my best in either of those and I'm stressed out during both of those times. I'm sure no one wants that. We want to make sure that we have time to refuel. We want to make sure that we have time to give our best energy to the people we love. We want to make sure that we're doing good at work. Right? So I think the challenge is we think balance means I spend an equal amount of time at work, at home, and that's what's going to make me feel good. But that doesn't make a lot of people feel good. Right? That doesn't make people feel good. So when it comes to analytical tasks, for the lark, early morning is the best. For the third bird, early to mid morning is best. And for the owl, late afternoon and evening is the best. Now, if you have a partner who's always working in the late afternoon or evening. Chances are it's because they're an owl. And that's the best time of day according to Daniel Pink, to do these things, depending on what we've just deciphered as your chronotype. What we've just discovered is your chronotype. So for analytical tasks, lark do it best early morning, third bird do it early to mid morning and the owl does it late afternoon and evening. Notice how that slight shift could change how you feel about your partner, how you feel about yourself, Stress, anxiety, overwhelm, burnout. What do all of these have in common?

A lack of perceived control over your.

Time, thoughts and tasks.

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On calm now insight tasks Tasks that require you to provide insight and this could be being present with your partner. Listening to them, it's more presence. Analytic is focused on inside his presence. For the lark, it's late afternoon, early evening, right? Late afternoon or early evening is the best time for a lark to do insightful presence based things. For the third bird, insight task same it's late afternoon and early evening. But now for the owl it's the morning. An owl does insight tasks best in the morning. I'm hoping you're listening to this and going, oh, now I realize why I don't have energy for that at that time. Now I realize why I'm not in the right state for that at that time. Maybe you're trying to do things at times when it's harder to do them. The way I describe that, and that's what we struggle with. Balance is what I love about nature is that things are not always balanced, but the seasons always flow. So things come and go in seasons. Now maybe you're like, I want to.

Grow apples all year round.

I want to grow X fruit all year round. That puts things out of balance. And sometimes we do that. We go, I want to do this for the rest of the year. I want to do this every single day. And that puts us out of balance because we're trying to grow something that you can't grow at that time. Right? There's certain things you can't grow in the winter. That doesn't mean you don't have another version of it. It doesn't mean you don't plant new seeds or it doesn't mean you don't take care of the land. You can do lots of things. You just don't expect something to grow. And I think that's the challenge. We're expecting perfect balance all year round. When we're going through a season that doesn't allow for balance, what's needed more is a priorities approach. A farmer or someone working in agriculture has a different priority in different seasons. They're still working on the same patch of land. You're still working on yourself. You're still giving love to your family. You just can't have a view that it's going to look the same every day. We have to start thinking of our life in seasons. We have to approach our life in seasons.

Okay?

Now, when you need energy, making an impression, your state of energy. Larks are best in the morning and making an impression. Third birds. Morning is the best time to make an impression. And we then have owls morning as well. That's when the owls will make their best impression, when you need that energetic expression of yourself. And finally when you need to make a decision which is more about planning as a state. Larks early morning, third bird early to mid morning, and owl late afternoon and evening. So what I'm trying to share here is that there are different times of the day when we're better at doing different things. And we have to realize that we can't just force ourselves to do everything all of the time. And balance can often feel like that, where we just feel exhausted because we're trying to do everything all at the same time. Now, there are habits that create more balance in our life and habits that create more imbalance in our life. For example, a habit that truly has unhealthy impact on us and our balance is a lack of sleep or sleep deprivation. It's really interesting because a lot of people will sacrifice sleep to watch a show or to feel like they're decompressing in order to feel balanced. Right? It's like, I've worked all day. I now need to balance myself by doing something mindless, like watching my favorite show. And here's what happens when we don't get enough sleep. There's a lack of alertness. Even missing as little as 1.5 hours can have an impact on how you feel. Impaired memory, lack of sleep can affect your ability to think, remember and process information. Relationship stress. It can make you feel moody and you can become more likely to have conflicts with others. So one of the reasons why I raised the idea of rest is rest is one of the great ways of causing balance, creating balance. And we do want to rest, but then we push further on days when a little bit more rest. So we say, oh yeah, I'll lie in on Saturday. But the one hour you missed every night from Monday to Friday was more impactful on your health than the extra one hour or two hours you got in bed on a Saturday morning. Right? Notice how that happens to so many people where we miss out or we struggle because we don't grab that sleep. So I want to share with you, how do we get these states right? How do we improve these states in our lives? So what gives us focus? Meditation helps us develop focus. And when we talk about meditation, I want to give you a really simple practice. I want you to light a little candle in your room, or you could have a diffuser, pour in a beautiful essential oil. And what I want you to do, whether you have the diffuser or the candle, I want you to first breathe in the scent. Just sit in the presence of the candle, of the diffuser, without anything else around you. And I want you to breathe in the scent and notice how it changes how you feel. The next thing I want you to do is look at the flame and in the diffuser, look at what's coming out. Take a moment to observe this deeply. Every flicker, every movement, every time the diffuser lets off steam. Just taking a moment to observe the colors, the frequency, the shapes. And the third thing I want you to do to improve your focus is go outdoors and just observe nature. Put a 60 second timer on your phone. Watch the leaves, watch a squirrel, watch the sun. Just be really focused on what is happening. Those simple habits will improve your focus drastically because you are narrowing in on one activity every day. If you were to do one of those things every day, your focus will start to improve. There's a beautiful quote by Bruce Lee where he said that I'm not scared of someone who's practiced 10,000 kicks, one each time. I'm scared of the person that's practiced one kick 10,000 times. Right? It's not the variety of things we do that impacts our life. It's the specificity and the quality of things that we do that improves our life. How deeply have you done something is more important than how many things have you done right? It's not about the variety, it's not about the number, it's about the depth. How do we get energy? We all know that energy comes through exercise. There's a great study that the researchers at the University of Georgia found that sedentary, otherwise healthy adults who engaged in as little as 20 minutes of low to moderate aerobic exercise three days a week for six consecutive weeks reported an increase in energy levels and feeling less fatigued. Pete McCall, the exercise psychologist at the American Council of Exercise, said if a sedentary individual begins an exercise program, it will enhance the blood flow carrying oxygen and nutrients to muscle tissue, improving their ability to produce more energy. When they did this study on two groups, they found that both exercise groups experienced a 20% increase in energy levels by the end of the study compared to the non exercising group, with the lower intensity group reporting a 65% drop in feelings of fatigue, while the more intense exercises reported reported a 49% drop in fatigue. The idea that we can move for simply 20 to 30 minutes a day can make a huge difference to our energy at the end of the day. Now, how do we get presence with the people we love? Well, when we don't sleep, we feel irritated. When we don't work out, we don't have the energy. When we don't have focus, we're not able to be present sometimes. How do we really be present with the people we love? We're present by knowing that we give the amount of time that we can be present. Often what ends up happening is we want the ego of saying I'm free all of Saturday, I'm with you. How fun is it going to be? But we're stressed by that over commitment. Often we over commit. We over promise because we want to feel and seem and be viewed as someone who cares. We want to show our partners and our families that we're present and that we care. But then what ends up happening is we're on our phones for the rest of that day. We're stressing out, we're anxious, we're nervous, we're not really there and people can sense it. It's so much better to be honest and maybe even be perceived as not caring and saying hey, I'm going to be half the day and Saturday I'm there but I've got to work the other half the day. That honesty is more powerful because for those four hours you will be the best person you can possibly be because you know you have that to truly be present. Too many of us are over promising and under delivering now what gives you the ability to plan? It's ideas, fueling yourself with ideas, books, thought processes, systems. And what gives you rest? Spending time in nature, listening to nature sounds. If you can't get out to nature, putting on a beautiful, calm meditation, allowing yourself to be in true stillness and true silence, even if you find it uncomfortable in the beginning. I want to thank you for supporting and listening to On Purpose. I hope this episode really, really helped today. I hope it's going to help you think about balance differently. I really don't want you to think of balance as like this equal distribution, even breakdown, and then feel bad and sad that you can't live up to it. None of us can. But what we can do is proportionately divide our time. Often one to two hours of personal habits a day can actually improve how we are throughout the day. There's one to two hours can impact the other 22 hours. Thanks so much for listening to On Purpose. I'll see you again next week for more exciting episodes with guests and our Friday workshops. Thank you so much. See you soon.

Hey, it's Joel and Matt from how to Money. If your New Year's resolution is to finally get your finances in shape, we've got your back prices, they're still high, and the economy is all over the place. But 2026 is the year for you to get intentional and make real progress.

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