It is a zero-sum game to think about work-life balance myth as a binary equation.
The more time you have with your family, the less time you will need to manage your career.
If you neglect your career, your family will be left behind. This is a circular approach to solving the problem.
David J. McNeff has a different approach. In his book The Work/Life Balance Myth, he takes a different approach. He asserts that there is no work-life balance.
McNeff proposes a seven-slice alternative. McNeff identifies seven areas where people spend their time. All seven are necessary.
The Spiritual Slice could refer to time spent in organized religion, or time spent contemplating the meaning of your life.
The Emotional Slice is time with friends, not family members or colleagues. The Intellectual Slice is time spent learning something new.
This Exercise is
Your time is divided into the percentage of your seven daily activities. This profile was created by Gwen, a client.
Family Slice: 15%
Professional Slice: 75 Percent
Personal Slice: 5 Percent
Physical Slice: 0 percent
Intellectual Slice: 3 percent
Emotional Slice: 1 Percent
Spiritual Slice: 1 Percent
How would you design your allocation?
Gwen realized her first realization when she realized that her life was not limited to her family and work.
She had been neglecting certain areas of her life. She was putting stress into her life by neglecting these areas.
How could she spend more time with her underserved meals?
The binary approach to solving the problem of work-life balance is one way. By taking away time from one side, you can’t add time to the other.
It’s not an either/or situation if you look at the problem from an ordinal perspective.
This is how you look at shifting positions and combing categories. Ordinal thinking is the ability to think about something in
a set of things that can be combined or shifted.
Gwen’s solution
Gwen started playing tennis with a friend every Saturday morning, thinking in an ordinal manner.
This allowed her to increase both the physical and personal slices of her body.
Gwen used to listen to tapes on her 40-minute commute to work each morning. Gwen was able to increase her intellectual breadth without having to sacrifice her professional slices.
Here’s another example of how to remove the zero-sum structure of work-life balance.
This is a transformation of the framework for managing life as an ordinary issue where activities can be combined.
One of our clients was the Managing Partner in a law firm. The family went to church every Sunday.
The church also offered religious education to the daughter. After examining the church committees, the managing partner discovered that the Religious Education Committee had two bank CEOs.
He was invited to join that committee. Thanks to the connections made through the committee, one of the banks eventually became a client at a law firm. This activity not only supported his professional slice, but also helped his family slice.
Summary and Conclusions
The issue is zero-sum when a life problem is defined as work-life balance. To add time to one side of a ledger, you must reduce time on the other.
The issue can be framed as a seven-slice ordinal challenge, which allows for creative slicing within and between categories.
McNeff’s book doesn’t include sleep as a critical Slice. However, sleep deprivation is a common business problem that is rarely discussed publicly.
Although people love to boast about how little they sleep, deprivation can lead to poor decision-making. (Stybel Peabody, 2019).
It doesn’t matter if you believe your life is made up of seven or eight pieces, this approach will help you to see the bigger picture and not just talk about your work-life balance.
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