March 10, 2022
Work-life balance is a topic of growing importance today.
You hear it everywhere. “Hey, I need to achieve a balance between my professional and personal life.”
And there’s nothing wrong with that.
However, the second richest man in the world (Jeff Bezos) doesn’t like the idea of work-life balance as he calls it a “debilitating phrase”.
The article will explore the meaning of work-life balance, what Jeff Bezos thinks and what he acknowledges instead.
Jeff Bezos is the founder and Executive Chairman of Amazon the e-commerce giant which he founded in 1994 out of his garage in Seattle.
He stepped down as CEO of the company to become executive chairman on July 5, 2021.
He is also the owner of private space company Blue Origin and the newspaper, Washington Post.
The term work-life balance has been in the American lexicon since the 1960s. But it was popularized by University of Chicago sociology professor Arlie Russell Hochschild and her book The Time Bind in 1997.
It’s a catchphrase that speaks to an increasingly common phenomenon: the fact that modern working life increasingly encroaches on and competes with our personal lives.
For some people, work-life balance means being able to work from home on occasion or being able to leave work early from time to time.
For others, it means having the opportunity for flexible working hours.
Work-life balance is the concept that employees can achieve a 50/50 balance between their personal and professional lives.
It implies an equal distribution of energy toward one’s professional and personal lives.
In this way, it differs from work-style balance, which suggests maintaining a steady flow of energy in both spheres.
Work-life balance does not necessarily mean working fewer hours overall as it entails more control over how and when work is done
There are several dimensions to this concept, including:
At an event in April 2018 with Mathias Döpfner, the CEO of Axel Springer, Jeff Bezos said new Amazon employees shouldn’t see work-life balance as a thing/ act of balance.
Rather, they should view it as two unified parts.
“It actually is a circle; it is not a balance” he stated.
Bezos said new Amazon employees should quit trying to find a “balance” between their professional and their personal lives as it implies a strict trade-off between the two.
“This work-life harmony thing is what I try to teach young employees and actually senior executives at Amazon too.
But especially the people coming in. I get asked about work-life balance all the time.
And my view is, that’s a debilitating phrase. It implies there’s a strict trade-off.”
The second richest man in the world said he doesn’t pigeonhole his personal or career life.
“And the reality is, if I am happy at home, I come into the office with tremendous energy.
And if I am happy at work, I come home with tremendous energy.”
To a large extent yes.
It’s almost impossible to find a balance between your career and your personal life.
Trying to do so will only see you decreasing the quality or quantity of one for the other.
To achieve a stellar career, you might find yourself staying up at night to do the work you couldn’t finish off at the office.
Your family time or even the time you spend with your friends may also reduce just because you have work to be done and deadlines to meet.
And if you want a more fulfilling personal life, work may suffer.
You need to go out more with the kids, your family, or friends, and then you forgo some work to be done.
You want to leave work earlier, what about the work yet undone, who will do it?
To improve productivity and performance, Jeff Bezos adopts the work-life harmony framework instead.
He told Thrive Global “I prefer the word “harmony” to the word “balance” because balance tends to imply a strict tradeoff.
In fact, if I’m happy at work, I’m better at home — a better husband and a better father.
And if I’m happy at home, I come into work more energized — a better employee and a better colleague.”
Work-life harmony means being happy with your life outside of work so that you come into your job with a positive attitude and enthusiasm.
It also means feeling good about your job so that you leave it at work and don’t bring it home with you
It’s basically about having a life outside of your job.
And it further suggests that your work should fit into your life rather than the other way around.
Realize that work-life balance is difficult to achieve and instead find harmony in everything you do.
This takes the pressure off of having to achieve perfection by compartmentalizing your life.
It gives you permission to do what you need to do and be attentive to the needs of the moment.
To harmonize work and life is to be present at the moment.
As trivial as it may be, being present is the key to achieving work-life harmony.
If you’re at work, focus on the activity at hand and give it your all.
When you’re done with work and are back home with family, leave work matters out of your mind.
This helps you direct your energy to the moment and ward off distractions.
Making a to-do list and checking tasks off as you go is useful as it keeps you organized and directed.
However, it’s easy to lose sight of your overarching goals when you’re focused too much on the day-to-day.
Set your weekly goals around the priorities that will help you achieve your life’s big dream.
This is setting your goals around the big picture, integrating your professional goals and your personal life thus allowing them to co-exist.
There’s a craze for the ability to stay without sleeping. People brag about it by saying that goal-getters don’t have 8 hours of sleep.
To improve your overall productivity and work-life harmony Jeff Bezos advises 8 hours of sleep.
He said “Making a small number of key decisions well is more important than making a large number of decisions.
If you shortchange your sleep, you might get a couple of extra “productive” hours, but that productivity might be an illusion.
When you’re talking about decisions and interactions, quality is usually more important than quantity.”
I’ll reiterate Jeff Bezos’s words “It actually is a circle; it’s not a balance.
And I think that is worth everybody paying attention to it.
You never want to be that guy — and we all have a coworker who’s that person — who as soon as they come into a meeting they drain all the energy out of the room.
You can just feel the energy go whoosh! You don’t want to be that guy.
You want to come into the office and give everyone a kick in their step.”
So, the struggle is real. And although it may seem like an impossible quest, I don’t think it needs to be. Instead of viewing work-life balance as a means to an end. Where you’ll eventually achieve it and never have to worry about it again. View it as an ongoing journey that you are taking with everyone around you.
It isn’t something that will happen overnight and there’s no perfect solution or organization system. It has to come from within yourself, but I believe we can all do better. The concept of work-life balance isn’t limited to the workplace either. It applies to the home life as well in terms of family harmony and personal hobbies.
I think when we view work-life balance as that important, it becomes much easier to prioritize your time and get through it week after week.
Therefore, finding a balance when work seems to take over your life can seem impossible. Finding that cyclic harmony, as Jeff’s advice suggests, is the key to it all.
Also Read: How to Think Like Elon Musk And Jeff Bezos
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