A New Frame for “Balance”

I have never really resonated with the word "balance," as in work-life balance. It brought to mind a judicial scale where the two areas that were supposed to be in balance were in opposition. For me, reality felt more integrated than that.

So a new way to think about balance finally hit me on a lunchtime walk last week. Perfect, right, that I was on a walk in order to find some balance?! That time away from the desk helped me think more creatively about what was happening.

What I realized was that, for me, having good balance meant that my perform-recovery cycles were small enough. It was my energy that was in balance.

Quick tangent: one of my favorite books is The Power of Full Engagement by Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz, I recommend it to clients who express interest in time management. The subtitle is "managing energy, not time, is the key to high performance and personal renewal." It was through that book that I learned that perform-recover cycles are natural and need to happen in order to achieve and maintain high levels of performance, just like with athletes.

The question, then, is, at what scale do the perform-recover cycles happen? I had spent more time than normal in February working, and thus less time resting. I’d lost a bit of balance at the month scale. Of course, this cycle happens for us all at the daily scale when we are awake all day and asleep at night. Ideally it should happen at the 1- to 2-hour scale (90 minutes on, 30 minutes off would be a good balance, as would the 50 minute meeting with 10 minutes of refueling and transition time) but I know for many of my clients that doesn't happen.

So basically, now I am looking at whether my energy is in balance and strategically placing in recovery times. Ideally I can design in multiple perform-recover loops throughout the day, but if it's a day of being fully 'on', then the following day probably needs to be a lighter one so that rest can happen.

I like this framing because I don’t see the recovery time as in competition with the working time. For me, the recovery time is often a hike or a yoga class, so I’m meeting another need around movement, but it’s often also a time where I experience more mental spaciousness that leads to creativity that feeds back to my work.