Weighing your options?

Work/Life Balance. It is a phrase I’ve heard numerous times and it is something that seems ever elusive. During an entrepreneur discussion panel the question regarding how to keep a work life balance surfaced and one of the answers offered a different way to approach it. Rich Christiansen of CastleWave said, “ I don’t do balance well. I go to extremes.” He’ll work like crazy until something is up and going and then take a month off to hike the Himalayas.

Another approach is to try a flexible work or work from home job. A cool site for that is http://hiremyparents.com based out of the UK but has jobs both stateside and abroad.

I think I’ll try to pick up something to finance my “surprise my wife” fund and the occasional frivolous purchase. Check out their own blog post about the myths of this work/life balance and suggestions for addressing the challenge.

On the AAUW Blog they cite a paper presented at the Academy of Human Resource Development International Conference:

 “The concept of the workplace community represents the essence of work-life balance. Work-life balance is not about having equal time every day for work and personal time, as some critics have suggested. It’s about being in an environment that honors both needs and builds in consideration for meeting work and personal needs as appropriate. The western philosophical concept of balance is an either-or proposition; you are either on one side or the other. Rarely are the sides of equal value and in balance. The result of the struggle for balance is usually a win-lose situation. The eastern concept of balance is the yin-yang symbol, representing an acknowledged tension of opposing forces. It’s a both-and proposition rather than an either-or one. Both sides can “win” because day-to-day one or the other side will have greater needs. All this is to say that those organizations that are humane know that caring for employees means the employees will care for the organization. One day the situation may call for everyone pitching in on an important project, another day it may mean covering for a team member whose child is sick, and another day everyone may be going to a company picnic. In the long term, everyone wins.”

I guess one of the great things about working for yourself is that you get to decide how humane of an organization you’re going to be; though it also means you don’t have anyone else to cover in case your absent. As for me and my house we’re going to try a work/life integration approach. Previously I have kept things very separate-separate calendars, different contact numbers, attended minimal work-related social gatherings. I think I may have come across as cold or uninteresting-my apologies to anyone who felt that way in the past. I’m going to take a dive into the psycho-analytic pool and say that I think that has been a function of being a different person at work in order to do things that I didn’t really enjoy. Playing a political role-playing game without the cool power-ups; tasked with constant missions or projects that seemed only vaguely related to anything in the big scope of the storyline. It isn’t that I didn’t make friends or wasn’t sincere but it was just a muted existence. 

So as a warning my future posts are likely to contain less than intellectually stimulating accounts of parenting and personal pet peeves as I make my life not just a combination of my work life and my personal life but my life period.