109. Work-Life Balance Is a Lie: 3 Better, Way More Practical Ways to Think About Balance
Episode 109
Everyone chases balance, thinking it’s the ultimate sign of a good student or good professional. But what if the entire concept is setting you up to fail from the start?
In this episode of the Learn and Work Smarter podcast, I break down why traditional work-life balance is a myth, and more importantly, what you should do instead. I'm giving you three practical frameworks that are way more realistic than trying to give equal time and attention to everything, every single day.
What You Learn:
The four fundamental problems with traditional balance that make it impossible to achieve
Why daily balance is the wrong goal (and what timeframe actually works)
How to stop dividing yourself into competing pieces
The power of naming what season you're in
Why guilt about imbalance means you're measuring the wrong thing
🔗 Resources + Episodes Mentioned:
⭐SchoolHabits University: (SchoolHabitsUniversity.com)
⭐The College Note-Taking Power System (CollegeNoteTakingSystem.com)
⭐Assignment Management Power System (AssignmentManagementSystem.com)
Episode 45 - Are You Doing Too Much?
Episode 68 - The Time Management Trap No One Talks About
Episode 102 - The Friday Review
Never stop learning.
❤️Connect:
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The following transcript was autogenerated and may contain some interesting and silly errors. But in the name of efficiency and productivity, I choose not to spend my time fixing them 😉
Why Work-Life Balance Is a Lie: 3 Better Ways to Think About Balance That Are Way More Practical
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[00:00:00] Everyone's telling you to find balance- balance between school and work, between productivity and rest, between work and play, between all of the different parts of your life. But hear me out. What if balance is the wrong framework entirely. What if balance is completely baloney. No, I do not swear on this show.
Hello and welcome to the Learn and Work Smarter podcast. I am Katie and we are in episode 109. And as you can tell from the title and from that intro, today we're talking about balance and why balance, I would say, as most people think about it, including how I used to think about it, and sometimes I still do, doesn't work.
And then more importantly, I'm gonna give you some frameworks, some, you know, different perspectives and, and ways of thinking about balance that are a little bit more practical, that are a little easier to achieve and that are polluted with less feelings of guilt and shame. Yes, please. So let's begin with a visual, a [00:01:00] hypothetical example.
I'm gonna try my best to paint a picture of what trying to find balance usually looks like for most people according to this, you know, traditional definition of balance that we're told we should strive for.
So let's say that you're a college student with a part-time job. You've got classes, you've got homework, you're trying to stay healthy and maybe exercise regularly. You wanna see your friends, but you need sleep.
Balance according to the traditional ideas of it says that all of these areas deserve equal time and attention. So let's say that on Monday you spend three hours on homework and you feel guilty 'cause you didn't exercise. So Tuesday you go to the gym and you see your friends, but now you know you're behind on your reading. And then Wednesday, yay, you gotta catch up on sleep. But you haven't called your family in a week and you're constantly keeping score like, did I give enough time to this thing? Am I neglecting that thing? And no matter what you choose, something else is getting short changed. Okay, that was [00:02:00] my student example.
Let me give you a professional example. Maybe you are a working professional and you're also in grad school. Your job needs 40 plus hours a week. Your coursework, let's say needs 20. Your family deserves quality time. Your health obviously matters. And balance, again, according to this traditional idea of it says that we should be doing all of these all of the time at equal value.
So we're beating ourselves up when we choose work over the gym. We feel like a bad student when you know, you skip the reading to spend time with your partner. You feel like a bad partner when you spend your weekend writing a paper instead of being present. And every single choice that we make feels like we are letting go or neglecting or abandoning somewhere else.
That's the, it's all about balance trap. So if you've ever felt unbalanced or even guilty for feeling like you're spending too much time with work and not enough time with family, or maybe too focused on social stuff and not enough time on school, or [00:03:00] all outta whack and all unbalanced, and you don't know what to do about it, this episode is exactly for you.
And if all of this is resonating with you, you might also wanna check out episode 45 where I talk about whether you are doing too much in the first place. And I give you some strategies for determining like, are you already at capacity or beyond capacity? And that's why this, um, seeking this journey toward balance is just futile in the first pace place.
Okay, so that'll be linked below. Now before we dive in, everything I mentioned today, as I just said, can be found in the show notes. Okay? You can go to learnandworksmarter.com/podcast/109. If you're watching this on YouTube, you can find all the links in the description box. And if you haven't subscribed yet, I would love so much for you to do that and let's get into it.
[00:04:00] So let's start the conversation by digging into why balance the way that most people think about it, the way that we've been taught to think about it, doesn't actually work in real life, particularly in the context of school and work.
Now, the first problem is that balance implies equal distribution.
When you think about a balance scale, right, both sides weigh the same. Everything is equal, and that is simple enough when we're talking about five pounds of rice on one side and five pounds of rice on the other side. But our real life isn't like that. Our dissertation and our Netflix habit are not equally important.
Our job that pays the bills and our hobbies we do for fun and joy are not equally important. Yet when we talk about balance, there is this underlying assumption that everything should get equal time, equal energy, equal [00:05:00] focus, equal resources. But that's just not realistic, and it honestly sets us up for guilt when we don't achieve that elusive balance, which we won't because it's elusive.
Now, the second problem is that balance is static. A balanced scale doesn't move. It sits there perfectly still with five pounds of rice on either side. But life isn't static, right? Sometimes we have three papers due some months work is insane. Some semesters are harder than others. And trying to maintain the exact same distribution of our time and our energy and our resources and our attention across all areas of our life year round is setting ourselves up to fail and to be disappointed because our lives don't work that way.
Now the third problem is that the concept of balance assumes everything is separate. That there is a work bucket, a school bucket, a family bucket, a health bucket, maybe a social bucket, a fitness bucket. And we talk about balance. [00:06:00] Like these are all completely different parts of our lives that need to be kept in separate containers.
And all of these containers have to be equal in terms of time and attention. But that is not how humans function at all, and that's not how our lives work. Our brain does not compartmentalize all of the spheres of our lives that cleanly and that distinctly. And when we try to force that distinction, when we try to keep work completely separate from school, completely separate from our personal lives, we are creating more stress and ironically, unbalance.
Plus obviously a lot of guilt layered on top.
And then finally the fourth and final problem with traditional concepts of work or school life balance is that it assumes that, you know, we have total control. It promotes this fantasy that if we just plan well enough, if we just manage our time better, if we just try harder. We can keep everything perfectly balanced and even all of the time, but we can't control [00:07:00] when our professor assigns a massive project the same week that our boss needs us to work overtime. We can't control when we get sick, or maybe when our family members get sick or a family emergency happens, or when life just throws us a curve ball or 11 of them because it's life, then that's what it does.
Traditional concepts of balance, assume a level of control over our circumstances that we simply don't have. We wanna have them, but we don't. So when we're trying to achieve balance and we keep failing or we're inconsistent with it, we're not necessarily, you know, doing anything specifically wrong. It's just that balance as a, as a framework, fundamentally doesn't have much integrity to it. It doesn't match the reality of how our lives work. And by the way, if you wanna go deeper into why traditional time management advice sets us up to fail, I cover that a lot in episode 68 called the Time management Trap.
That's where I reveal one of the sneakiest reasons why we feel like we don't have enough time to do everything even though our [00:08:00] calendars, you know, technically say that we do. That link, like all the links I mentioned is in the show notes, the description box, where if you're watching on YouTube, and of course at Learnandworksmarter.com/podcast/109.
Okay. But if balance doesn't work, which I just gave you four reasons why it doesn't, all right. What does work? What do we do instead of, you know, trying for this work-life balance? That is a fair question, and that is the meat of today's episode.
Now I'm gonna give you three alternative frameworks that are way more practical and realistic than we've what, than what we've been taught about balance. Um, and the first one I'm gonna call integration. Alright, so I didn't make up the word, but like that's not like a real thing. So if you go to Google, like what is balance and integration, it's not gonna be something that shows up.
So let me just explain this concept. The way I see it here, integration is about recognizing that the different areas of our lives don't have to kept in completely separate [00:09:00] buckets. Instead of trying to balance work and school and personal life as if they're competing priorities and you know, just competing roles that we have, we try to look for ways that one thing can serve multiple purposes.
Let me give you some examples of what this looks like in practice. I think examples are always helpful. Maybe you're in grad school and your thesis topic actually relates to your job.
So in one way, when you're working on one, you're kind of working on the other too. That's integration. You're not doing school work and work work separately. Your research for class is also professional development. You're learning things that make you better at your job while you're also getting your degree and working on your dissertation or your thesis.
Or maybe you need to exercise and you want to exercise, but you also wanna spend time with friends. Well, okay, instead of trying to balance the gym and seeing your friends is two completely different things work out with a friend, or you join some rec league. Okay? Now you're doing two things at once. Or let's [00:10:00] say that you're working on a project at work that requires you to, I don't know, may like learn a new skill.
And that same skill is something that you need for one of your classes. Well, instead of treating those as two separate learning curves or two separate things that both require different kinds of attention, you tackle them together. If not literally, 'cause it doesn't always, you know, work out like that.
Then at least conceptually you change the way you think about it. The work you do for your job counts toward your class assignment. The research you're doing for class makes you better at your work project. And you learn to become satisfied that the way that you're doing your schoolwork is enough to count as balanced or as enough to count as energy that you're putting toward your work.
Work. We're changing our expectations. We're changing the way we view this. Integration doesn't mean, you know, everything has to overlap all the time. The point is to get creative about where different areas of your life might overlap even just a little bit. We're not gonna try to force anything to connect, you know, when it, when it doesn't.
But when you [00:11:00] start looking for those natural overlaps, you're gonna find ways to combine your energy across different spheres instead of treating everything like it needs its own separate time slot, because that's impossible. And that is more in tune with the traditional definition of balance that I am really gonna try today to steer you away from.
Because it's just unachievable. The second alternative framework to traditional, you know, balance is prioritization. And I know a lot of you are thinking like, well, obviously prioritization matters. Like that's obvious and I, I know how to do that, but hear me out. Because I think that a lot of people aren't really prioritizing the way that they think they are, or they think they're prioritizing a certain way, but it doesn't have the effect that they're hoping it will.
Prioritization means accepting that at any given moment, only one. Or two things are your actual priorities and everything else just defaults into, you know, maintenance mode or it doesn't happen at all. Not I'm gonna get to it later, [00:12:00] but genuinely accepting that some things are not gonna get done well or aren't gonna get done at all.
And this is different from balance, which deceives you into thinking that everything can get adequate attention if you just manage your time better. But prioritization says no. Actually you have to choose. You choose between this thing and you choose between that. It's one or the other, not. I'll do this now and then I'm gonna stay up really late to do this other thing too.
No, it's, I'll do this one thing and the other thing is gonna go, alright, it's gonna go into some maintenance mode. I'll talk about that in a little bit, uh, a little bit later if I remember, or it's just not gonna happen at all. So what does prioritization look like in practice Maybe you're in the final weeks of a semester and you have two major papers due.
Those papers are your priority. Your work. If you're like a working student, goes into some default maintenance mode. You're gonna show up. You're gonna do what's required, but you're not gonna go above and beyond right now. Okay? Save that for a different [00:13:00] season. Exercise, maybe that's three times a week instead of five.
Social life, maybe that's just gonna be minimal or nonexistent for the next two weeks. You know if, if you're doing any of it at all, any socializing at all. And you make peace with that because you've decided what matters to you now, and remember, it's temporary. Or maybe you're in a busy season at work, um, with a major project or some deadline that's coming up in that season, in that moment, work is the priority.
Your grad school coursework, you are just gonna do the minimum to get by. You're just reading the summaries of things instead of full chapters. Yeah. I'm promoting that in this, in this moment. Sometimes that's what we have to do.
You're shooting for BS instead of A's.
And that is okay because you have consciously decided that work is coming first this month. Now, the key word there is consciously you are making an intentional choice about what gets your best energy and what doesn't. You're not trying to do everything equally well, and then feeling guilty when you can't, because heads up, you can't.
That's falling into that [00:14:00] balance trap, right, that we're trying to get away from. You're deciding what matters the most to you in this season. I'm gonna talk about seasons in a moment too, and we're letting the other things slide or pause without feeling guilty about doing that. Now this doesn't mean that we're abandoning everything except our top priority. Maintenance mode is a real thing that we have to learn how to, um, turn on, I guess. And it's often necessary. So we don't like fail our classes and get fired from our jobs. We're still showing up at work, even when school is our priority. You're still doing some baseline self-care, even when you're prior prioritizing something else for that moment. But you're not trying to give everything equal weight all of the time.
We're being strategic about where our energy goes for a particular moment in our lives.
And then the third and final framework is what I'm calling larger scale balance and seasons, or more like larger scale or seasonal balance, I guess probably sounds better. This [00:15:00] involves zooming out. All right, let me explain.
So instead of trying to balance everything every single day, like on a daily scale, we're trying to balance across weeks or months. So that's a larger scale, not days, but weeks or months. And we're also recognizing when we're in a particular season of life that requires a temporary imbalance that we learn to become okay with.
But let me start with the, um, like the larger scale months or uh, weeks or months sort of piece first. Traditional balance theory says that every day should be well-rounded, like a little bit of work, a little school, a little exercise, a little social time, a little rest, a little, play a little of everything.
But that's not realistic and it's not, you know, that doesn't match how we have to live our lives. I prefer to think in terms of larger scale balance, which says that maybe Monday through Wednesday you're heavily focused on work. Maybe Thursday and Friday are more school heavy days. Saturday you can catch up on life admin and errands, and maybe Sundays is like rest and [00:16:00] social time, or you know, find your joy on Sundays, whatever it is, whatever days and activities match your own life.
But over the course of a week, we've touched all the important areas, but we didn't try to cram everything into a single day.
Or an alternative is that we can zoom out even further like a month. So maybe September tends to be like a really work intensive month 'cause of a big, uh, in project or, you know, if you're in school, September tends to be a big school month 'cause that's when most schools are in session.
Maybe October school heavy 'cause you have midterms, right? If you're in the end of October, if you're in in college, November balances out a little bit. Cool. I mean, what's going on in November besides holidays? December might be crunch time for finals. You're looking here for balance across months. Okay. Not across days. That kind of removes some of the pressure we have at the end of every day being like, did I do this? Did I do this? It's like, you look at the month, did I do, did I, did I, you know, tap into all of my buckets and all of my roles and all of my [00:17:00] prior priorities this month. And this is so much more achievable and sustainable and it aligns with how most of us humans have natural seasons over the course of a year Anyway, whether you know we're working professionals or we're students.
The seasons piece takes this even further. So I was just talking about like weeks and months, but let's talk seasons now. Sometimes we're not just balancing week to week or month to month. We're in an entire season of life where one thing is dominating, and that's okay because we know it's temporary and we have this new way of thinking about balance.
Let me give you a personal example of what this looked like for me. When I was in graduate school, I was also working full-time as a special education teacher at a high school, and I was also running my private practice SchoolHabits, and I had a four and a 5-year-old at home. Okay. My kids are only 16 months apart.
They're teenagers now, but this was back then, I completed grad school in about 18 months. That's what I wanted to do. And I had to accept that this was going to be an ultra busy [00:18:00] season of my life. I mean, I hardly had any social engagements for that season. I never sacrificed my workouts. That's a, a promise I've made to myself.
But I got creative. Sometimes I'd get to class early and I'd go hiking on this little trail that was behind one of the buildings when I took, um, some summer classes. So I incorporated a little bit of integration strategy. See what I did there. We talked about integration earlier. Um, during the season, I was not the best at returning phone calls or text messages.
But the people in my life who supported what I was doing fully embraced the season I was in, and they didn't hold any of that against me. If they did shame on them, I had to ask for help with my kids. My husband and my parents took on roles that they previously hadn't taken on. It was not easy at all.
Like it was actually the hardest periods of my entire life, but I knew it was temporary and I knew it was just in this season. It was for a, a defined period of time. Now, if I had held myself to the expectation that I would have balance every [00:19:00] single day, I would've felt so much guilt. Right.
I definitely did feel guilt. Come on, mom. There is no escaping guilt when you're a parent. Or even just, I guess when you're a human. There's days when I would be teaching at the high school, starting at seven in the morning. Classes start at 7 25, right? And I'd work till two 30 and I'd see a few clients after work in my private practice, and then I would drive directly to a nighttime grad class a few towns away.
Nothing was on Zoom back then. It was all in person. So I had to drive there. And sometimes I wouldn't get home from class until 9 45, 10 o'clock at night. And on those days I might have only seen my kids a little bit in the morning and talked to them on the phone while I was driving, you know, from one place to another.
This was not every day. I think it was like Tuesdays or something was my crazy banana day. I don't remember. But it was what I had to do and I found a rhythm and I was able to endure it because I knew it was temporary, like all seasons are. And I knew that the things that I was putting aside or putting in maintenance mode would have their turn at the surface again once the season [00:20:00] changed.
The power of thinking in seasons is that we can name what we're in. I'm a new job season, right? I'm in dissertation season. I'm in busy season at work season. If you're a student athlete, it might be literally like I'm in field hockey season, and that might be really busy for you, but when you name it, you give yourself permission to lean into what this particular season is gonna require from you.
And because you named it as a season, you know that it's not gonna last forever. And I think that the benefit of large scale balance and seasonal thinking or large scale seasonal thinking, however we are saying it right, is that we can go deep on the things when they need our attention. Instead of this constant, unrealistic context switching between five different priorities we have. We're getting more done, we're doing it better.
Because we're allowing ourselves to focus and go all in on one or two, it's prioritization, things that we need to go all in on. Again, this is temporary and we're not beating ourselves up [00:21:00] for failing at daily balance because daily balance was never the goal in the first place.
All right, so now you've got three different frameworks, integration, prioritization, and then larger scale balance and seasons.
And you might be wondering like, okay, which one do I use? And the answer is, it depends on your situation. Least helpful answer ever. This is true. Honestly, you're probably gonna use more than one at the same time. I know I did in that example that I shared with you about grad scale, uh, grad school and working.
If you're someone who's juggling multiple roles, maybe you're a student and a professional, you're a working parent, someone managing multiple projects, integration is absolutely gonna be a friend. So I want you to look for those overlaps, like where can one thing serve multiple purposes? Can you lean into the natural overlaps that already exist?
If you're in a particular intense period, so maybe it's finals week, maybe some major work deadline, maybe you're launching something new, prioritization [00:22:00] is gonna become critical there. You have to decide what is gonna get your best energy and what is gonna default into maintenance mode.
You can't do everything at a hundred percent like that doesn't even math, right? So what's the one or two things that matter most for now? And I would also like to say, see, I remembered I said I would come back to it, that I've brought up this concept of maintenance mode a few times in this episode, and that is just the concept of doing the absolute minimum to keep your current systems going in a way that's just about survival.
And the bare minimum maintenance mode doesn't involve new ideas or growth or extra anything. Okay. And I would say that it's probably a good idea to start thinking about what maintenance mode might look like for each of the roles in your life. I'll give you a really basic example to illustrate this idea, but I, I, like you probably aren't surprised by this at all, but I like to have a really clean house.
I like it to be neat and minimal and clean. But if I am in the middle of some huge project or maybe developing a new [00:23:00] program or a new course, my house upkeep goes into maintenance mode. I have my standards that I'm never gonna drop, so my kitchen will still be spotless and the bathroom's gonna be clean because hygiene, right?
But if the laundry doesn't get done well, then heck, like no one's gonna die and my kids can do their own laundry or wear something different. Now, if you're realizing that you need help figuring out what your priorities actually are, or you're struggling to create the systems that can handle these different frameworks, especially when it comes to managing assignments, taking notes, or developing the core academic skills that make any of what I talk about on the show possible, that's exactly what I teach inside my courses. I have SchoolHabits University, which is my comprehensive program covering all of the academic skills you need, all the stuff we talk about on the show. I have the assignment management power system, and the note taking power system for more targeted support in managing assignments and taking notes.
You can check all of those and compare them at schoolhabits.com/courses. Now, if you're really [00:24:00] feeling guilty about daily imbalance, like you worked all day and you didn't exercise, or you spent the whole weekend on homework and you didn't even see friends, I would say zoom out to more like the larger scale balance, right?
That's the, the framework I would encourage you to use if that's your scenario. So like, did you at least, you know, touch all the important areas this week or this month? That's what matters more. Not whether every single day was perfectly balanced.
If you need help with implementing a practical system for reviewing your week to even, you know, see what that big picture is, episode 102 called the Friday Review. It's called something with the Friday. It's about the Friday review. That is a great resource for that. And then if you're in a defined period where one thing is dominating your life, maybe it's a new job, maybe it's grad school, maybe it's some major life transition, name the season you're in. Give yourself permission to go all in on this one area. It's not permanent, right? The things that you're putting aside temporarily are [00:25:00] gonna have their time again when this season ends.
Now listen, these frameworks aren't mutually exclusive. You can be in a busy season at work, so you might need to require seasonal thinking?
Um, prioritizing a work project over everything else. That's obviously prioritization, while also looking for ways to integrate your professional development with your grad school co coursework. And that's gonna be integration. And zooming out to make sure that you're getting some exercise and social time across the month, even if it's not every single day.
That would be more the large scale, um, balance. Like on a, a weekly and monthly scale. The point isn't to pick just one framework and use it forever. The goal is to question the myth of daily balance and to think more strategically about how you're allocating your time and energy across the different areas of your life at different times of your life.
Whew. All right. Let's bring this episode home. I will not be one of those people who's like, let's land the plane. There's so much funny language out there. Let's circle back. Stick a pin in [00:26:00] it. Land the plane. No, I'm gonna bring this episode home. Balance the way that most people think about it, the way we've been taught to think about it, it really sets us up to fail, or at least to feel bad.
It requires everything to be equal. That life is static, that we can cleanly, compartmentalize all our roles, and that we have completely control over everything. And none of that is true. So I'm gonna challenge you to start thinking differently about how you manage the different areas of your life. All right, integration.
Let's see. Find natural overlap so you're not dividing yourself into separate pieces and judging yourself when you don't have all of the pieces together. Prioritization is giving you permission to focus on one or two high need things for a set period of time, and then just letting the other pieces go into maintenance mode or drop off altogether without feeling bad about it.
Larger scale or seasonal balance encourages you to zoom out, aiming for some sense of balance across weeks or months, you know, [00:27:00] instead of days, and then also naming the season we're in so we can just lean into it and accept that there's gonna have to be sacrifices. Remember, we don't have to choose just one of these frameworks.
Most of us are honestly using all three at the same time in in different ways depending on what we're dealing with and our own personal capacity. So here's what I want you to take away from this episode. I, I really want you to give up this traditional idea of work life or school life balance, while where you're giving equal energy and attention and time to everything every day. It's not realistic and trying for it is usually going to make us feel inadequate.
Instead, here's what we do. We ask ourself, where can I integrate? Where's my true priority right now? Am I zooming out far enough or if I, am I being too myopic? And am I focused just like on today? What season am I in? Those questions are hopefully gonna give us the calm, even stable feeling that traditional balance promises but so rarely ever delivers.
Thank you so [00:28:00] much for your time today. Keep showing up. Keep doing the hard work. Keep asking the hard questions, and of course, never stop learning.
