Work-life balance doesn’t exist.
Every Monday morning and Friday night are part of the same life. You don’t trade 40 hours a week for bank holidays, weekends and Ryanair getaways to Amsterdam.
All the 168 hours in your week are equal.
How you spend them is entirely up to you. Yes, you’ll need enough money to get by, but the options for earning it are likely more diverse than you realise.
Here are a few alternatives to full-time work:
Work two part-time jobs.
Freelance your skills via Freelancer, Upwork or Fiverr.
Contract yourself to 3, 6 or 12 month projects.
Sell products or services through a side-hustle.
Write code that you can sell as SAAS.
Create an online course to teach a skill.
And there are thousands more.
To explore them, you don’t need to go all in. Start small, and read all the free online guides you can. Then choose a path and just get started.
If you enjoy what you do full-time, that’s cool too. Just make sure you know what options are available to you and why being employed 40 hours a week is your choice.
Now that you know what’s possible.
Let’s explore how to create it.
Here’s how you master working.
#1: Redefining Your Success
Success is a prescription created by our parents as “getting a good job”, packaged by our friends as “being happy” and sold by society as “looking good”.
It’s given a vague description and left open to interpretation by anyone seeking to rank themselves against the lives of their childhood friends.
It sounds like “He has it all” or “What a loser!”.
But, it doesn’t have to be this way.
Success through this lens will forever be beyond your reach as you continually find the next LinkedIn influencer on your timeline to compare yourself to.
Instead, reflect the mirror back onto yourself.
Try asking the person you see:
“What do you enjoy doing?”
“What problems do you want to solve in the world?”
“What are your income aspirations?”
“What are you exceptional at doing?”
Then see if you can combine all 4 answers.
In the middle you’ll find your Ikigai:
Use it to identify where to focus your efforts.
Then use the direction to turn your dreams into practical goals with unshakable reasons.
An example:
Reason: I want to be financially independent.
Long-range goal: In five years, I will have built a business that pays me more than £10,000 per month with only 10 hours a week needed to operate it.
Short-range goal(s):
a) Build and sell at least 100 copies of an online course.
b) Earn more than £4,166 pre-tax monthly income from the business.
c) Grow an online following of 25,000 across all platforms.
Then add time-frames to your goals. Now you have a measure of success that is focused only on yourself and not on comparison to others.
#2: Create Your Squiggly Career
Careers are becoming increasingly squiggly.
There’s less climbing corporate ladders on a predetermined promotion pathway and more taking career breaks and deciding your own learning journey.
We have more freedom to choose how our careers pan out. Which can be as scary as it is liberating.
With so much choice, how do you choose?
1) Identify and develop your strengths
Avoid compensating for your weaknesses.
Find the “super strengths” that your colleagues, friends and family associate with you when you're not in the room. Then double down on them.
2) Recognise and integrate your values
Reflect on the type of person you are.
Then agree only to work with people in industries that allow you to express your true self. If you can’t bring your full self, you won’t exceed your potential.
3) Focus on exploring your possibilities
Imagine the possible futures for yourself.
Examine each possibility for the next stage of your life from the obvious to the ambitious to the dream. Then choose one, stick with it and learn if it's right for you.
The linear career is a relic of the past.
In its place is a void from which you can pour into everything you’ve wanted to try and more. Just make sure you give each step enough time to know whether it is right for you.
#3: Blur Your Boundaries
With clear goals and a squiggly career to get you there, integrating your work and life becomes possible to those looking for true freedom.
To blur your boundaries you need flexibility.
This means working with an employer who provides:
Freedom in when you work.
Flexibility in where you work.
A focus on outputs over time.
If you can’t find a job like this, create one for yourself.
Freelance your services to clients for a set project fee that represents the value of your work, not the time taken to deliver it.
Then you can choose a schedule of work that fits with you.
Write reports on Saturday so you can go rock climbing on Tuesday.
Smash an 80 hour week so you can take a two week holiday.
Go for an afternoon cycle to solve your greatest strategy problem.
Just make sure you’re prioritising both work AND life.
You can’t be your best without regularly leaving the house, getting your adrenaline pumping and catching up with friends who will make you laugh like a horse.
The Summary
Let’s recap; To master working you need to redefine your success, create your squiggly career and blur your boundaries.
That was 5 minutes. Now take ACTION.
If you want further reading, here’s this week’s list: