Economy or ecology. Nature or nurture. Love it or leave it. These euphonious but phony sichotomies can have potentially disastrous consequences in our thinking. By making false opposites where there are none, they constrain our thinking. Work or life is a phrase much the same, but without the redeeming sonorous quality.
I need to make an immediate caveat here; I am not proposing we neglect our children, work all weekend, and give up our holidays. But I do want to take issue with the assumptions underlying the work-life balance construct.
The first point is that it’s hard to know over what time-period to think about the balance. Weeks? Months? Years? A career? We know that exceptionally intense effort can create deep mastery at work or play; early deep immersion creates the expertise that supports work and life later on. I always advise young teachers to devote themselves to every aspect of classroom and curriculum practice in their early years; like compound interest, the benefits grow and grow over many decades. That means long hours thinking, planning, marking, researching and testing out ideas – sustained over years, they are an investment that repays many times over. Skimping on this investment early on is a mistake.
Those long hours can be difficult, for sure; but that leads straight to a central point; that the very concept of work-life balance seems to assume that the more you have of one, the less you have of the other. While there are many around the world for whom that is still tragically true, I know I write from, and I imagine most readers are reading from, positions of privilege here, and for us at least, it does not have to be that way. We have many choices open to us; and it seems to me that our responsibility to ourselves and our families, let alone broader society, it to choose to construct our working lives so that they mean more than just earning a paycheque. To the teacher who has no interest in being a master-teacher, in serving students better, I ask why teach? But if you’re in it as a calling, then the long hours and demands from students and families and colleagues aren’t a chore – they’re milestones on the journey; they are part of who you are, and who you aspire to be. They are how you make your contribution.
The same can be true of most of our working lives – so if we want to feel we bring meaning and value to our lives then we need to work out how we can do that in the environments we have chosen. If life can only start when we leave work, then we’re in the wrong lines of work. So I see the challenge as finding ways to ensure that work and life are not opposed in a zero-sum game; and asking about balance is sometimes simply the wrong question.
Reclaiming work in this way, and aligning it more with our identity is a familiar theme. As many others have said, work can and should be more about making a life than about making a living; and it’s a topic that we discuss with students again and again.
1 Response
Work-life balance isn't just a false dichotomy as you've explained here, it's an unattainable one. At a meeting for professional women years ago, I heard a wonderful speaker reframe the goal as finding "comfortable chaos." That really resonated with me. I love my work and find it meaningful, but it's easier to immerse myself in it, knowing that I'll have weeks of time in the summer when I am not bound by it. I know; I know; teachers work during the summer, but it's a very different type of work. I do some of my most creative and innovative planning when I'm free from the day-to-day activities of the classroom which sometimes feels like playing a game of whack-a-mole. For other industries, and this is especially true in the United States, being 'on vacation' means that you can leave the office, but you are still responsible for all of your active projects. So, you can increase your workload before you leave or work extra time when you return but that often negates the value of taking time away. There's an increasing trend here of companies offering unlimited vacation, which more often than not translates to NO VACATION because there is never a time when it is convenient to go away. All this speaks to the need, as you put it, to "construct our working lives so that they mean more than just earning a paycheque." I look forward to the UWC leaders of tomorrow.