Work Life balance....

An illusive search continues to haunt ..... both as fear of loosing it and being every one aspiration to achieve it. For the first time I saw Work Life balance at No.1 spot in employees value proposition for Indian employees. though it is common to appear as No.1 EVP factor in Australia and New Zealand.

I was not thinking about..... if or not there is a reality in real world for a concept of work life balance or is it just illusion created from not getting needed emotional validation at work ....which we expect just because we spend 10hrs a day in office.

Last week when I met my doctor and he enquired about my 2 phones.....one smart phone was my personal and great BlackBerry was my office phone. He was curious why I need 2. I said one is for work and other is for personal life. He was quick to say.....your work should be life. very opt for a well know heart specialist to say so......(sigh...)

I wanted to look into this from the point of time ...... being bit more quantitative

During the search I found some interesting research done by Christian Kroll , Sebastian Pokutta ( :Just a perfect day? Developing a happiness optimised day schedule:Journal of Economic Psychology Volume 34 2013 210 - 217.)


They put some serious research on what is been considered as perfect day by person. I believe this is what every one look for the day they can achieve perfect day and say...."I have work life balance now".

The research points out in a "perfect day" person would only want to work for 36 minutes...!!!

Illusive isn't it....

than cant we have that perfect day or that work life balance????

I took a dig at average time I believed most who know will spend in a working at work or otherwise. I believe we spend 54% to 69% of our time outside our office or work as we can call it. More importantly we don't spend more than 25% a year in office.
 

.....but......it doesn't feel that way............it feels like we spend 80% of time in office.

Why?

is it because we don't find those components which make an ideal day.....in office......like relationship......like meditation time....socialising....and try to substitute with something similar.......but don't get what we expected.

Instead can we......

1. Start using that 69% which we spend outside office effectively by spending quality time with family and more importantly with oneself.

2. Using the commuting time effectively to listen to music, Audio book or photo on the way or reading book ......anything which possible at that time.

3. Stop expecting emotional validation at office and stop expecting respect for our office achievement at home. Instead put effort to get it other way.

Do you know how much time it is ....if it is 69% or even 54%.......

 There is 31536000 seconds in a year.......69% mean....21759840 seconds.......can we use it effectively for our family and for our self.