Ryan Vaughn argues work-life balance is a myth. Instead, he proposes the 3.3 Rule: focused work intervals paired with recovery periods that boost productivity and free time for family and hobbies. Impact matters more than hours.
Work-life balance, common phrase that we hear. My team members use it at Insight Tax. I've put it in my book, The 3.3 Rule, but it's a phrase I don't love. Balance, by definition, is talking about some sort of equal distribution. So there's symmetrical balance. So if I have 24 hours in the day, that means work-life balance is 12 hours of work and 12 hours of life. I can tell you from experience, when I wasn't living the 3.3 rule, when I wasn't taking adequate breaks, I was working my tail off as a solopreneur tax professional. 12 hours a day is not sustainable for most normal people. And if you're listening to me and you're like, well, it is for me, I just, I challenge you to look at that again. Try working a normal week then. If you're finding yourself working 12 hours or more a day, do a week with only 8 hours. I think you're gonna find that other elements of your life are going to improve. There's also asymmetrical balance. So in this case, I— the example I think of is if I'm sitting on one end of a teeter-totter, it would take the weight of probably all my other 4 kids on the other side to balance out my weight. So it's an equal distribution of weight, but From an impact standpoint, my weight has a larger impact on my side because it takes 4 of my children's weight to impact the balance. That's how I think about work-life balance because again, from a symmetrical standpoint, 12 hours of work is not sustainable. It doesn't even sound appealing to me. I like what I do. I like solving problems, but we need to have different things in our life. It can't just all be work. That's not my viewpoint of a full comprehensive life that maybe gives me harmony. So I think about the phrase that, again, that I don't like, work-life balance. I still think about it in terms of impact. It's not the number of hours that I work, it's the impact that those hours have, which is why we like the 3.3 rule, because those who follow it and then have their focus time followed by the recovery time, are getting more done than the person who's just sitting down and thinking they're working nonstop. The other thing about balance is that in order for something to balance, it has to be able to be separated. And I don't believe you can separate work from life. Your life impacts your work and your work impacts your life. We've had experiences with team members where they've gone through accidents and physically weren't able to do things. That was in their life, but because they physically weren't able to do things, it affected their work. I've had dear friends who have been through scenarios where a lot of heavy stuff was going on in their life and really important moves they needed to make business-wise, like creating a new department and interviewing the head of that new department, got delayed for years. Because of the heaviness of what's going on in life. And I remember talking to one friend specifically and I said, what's going on? I thought this was something you needed to do and you saw the value of it. He's like, I just, I can't bring myself to find time because the stuff going on in my life is constantly on my mind and it's affecting my ability to focus. Work affects life, life affects work. I also think life is too broad of a term for this idea of balancing. I have— there's family time, but family time is I want to spend time with my wife, I want a relationship with my kids, so I need to spend time there and cultivate that. Um, I also want to have hobbies, all of which are not related to, to work. If you're religious, believing in God and giving time to God, those types of things. Like, life can be all of those things. And so now we're not just balancing 2 things of work and life, we're balancing a variety of things. And again, each thing affects the other. And so that's why I don't like the term balance. Um, I do like the term work-life harmony. It still keeps it simple, but harmony to me is a better element. I mean, I get it. No one's gonna say work, family, God, hobby, harmony. It's just easier to say work-life harmony. But I don't think of life as just one end and then work on the other. There's— we have a variety, more of a 4D model, if you will. So work-life harmony, I think, is something that is better for us to try to strive towards. Because ultimately, with that in mind, it becomes a lot easier for me to want to have my work time super impactful so that the number of hours I spend on that is reduced compared to then the number of hours I can spend on the other things that give me a lot of fulfillment as well. I hope everyone has a job and work where they find fulfillment, but I know that that's not always the case. I think it's something to strive towards, but we can have fulfillment. Everyone should be able to reach fulfillment in the other areas of their non-work. time spent. Because you should choose those. Whatever your passion is that's healthy for you and productive, those should be things that can give us fulfillment. So ultimately, that, that's why I don't like work-life balance. It's too simple. Let's, let's try for work-life harmony. And the 3.3 rule is one great tool that can help you find that. So please, uh, Download the link. We have a 3.3 Defined Guide below that goes through the rules and, and how you can make your work time impactful so you have more time to do other things that give you a higher chance of finding fulfillment. If you found this valuable, please remember to like it, comment on it, share it with others. We, we want everyone to be aware of the 3.3 Rule. I really think it can revolutionize the way the world works, and the overall happiness that people can experience.
