Work-Life Balance Is the Wrong Goal

Dear Insiders,

We've been talking about work-life balance for years, and I think we're aiming for the wrong thing.

The problem isn't that we haven't figured out how to balance work and life properly.

It's that our lives were never neatly divisible in the first place.

There's an old idea that a day should be split into: 8 hours of work, 8 hours of sleep and 8 hours for recreation.

Except those numbers don't add up in real life.

If you work 8 hours but spend an hour getting to the office and another hour getting home, work has already claimed 10 hours of your day. Then there's getting ready for work, cooking, buying groceries, doing laundry, paying bills, going to appointments and all the other unpaid labour required to keep a life running.

If you have children or ageing parents to care for, there's even more to fit in.

None of this is “recreation”.

So when exactly are those 8 hours of life supposed to happen?

This is why I think time agency is a better goal than work-life balance.

Most of us don't need every day divided perfectly between work and everything else. There will be weeks when work demands more. There will be times when family needs more from us. And there will be occasions when we willingly give a project more of our time because it matters to us.

What matters is how much choice we have over those decisions.

This is also why flexible work has become so important.

I've worked for employers who wanted everyone in the office during working hours because it was easier to walk over to someone whenever they needed to discuss something or assign a task.

I understand the convenience.

But that convenience comes at someone else's expense.

For an employee commuting an hour each way, 5 days in the office means 10 hours a week spent simply getting to and from work. That's more than an entire working day.

Of course, there are good reasons to bring people together, and not every job can be done remotely. But requiring physical presence because it is more convenient for management is very different from requiring it because the work genuinely benefits from it.

And flexible work isn't truly flexible if you're allowed to work from home but expected to be constantly available. That's a change of location, not necessarily greater control over your time.

Ultimately, there are only 24 hours in a day.

We can optimise our schedules. We can set boundaries. We can become more productive. But none of those things creates more time.

And that's why work-life balance is the wrong goal.

The better question is: how much control do I have over how my finite time is spent?

Because sustainable ambition isn't about becoming better at squeezing work, family, responsibilities, rest and ourselves into the hours we've been given.

It's about having enough agency to decide what deserves those hours in the first place.

If this sounds familiar, it connects to something I wrote recently about why you can't self-care your way out of a burnout culture.

Both ideas come back to the same problem: we keep asking individuals to manage their way around systems and expectations that leave too little room for recovery, responsibility and life outside work.

Work-life balance puts the responsibility on us to balance everything. Time agency asks a different question: how much control do we actually have over the time we're trying to balance?

“Work-life balance asks us to manage our time better. Time agency asks who gets to control it.”