A favourite question of my father’s was, “Do you live to eat or eat to live?”  I long ago found the answer to that one: I live to eat…and drink and travel and talk.  Now the big question seems to be, “Do we live to work or work to live?” and over recent years the strange concept of work-life balance has appeared.  I say strange because the juxtaposition of the two processes suggests a certain mutual exclusivity: either we work or we live.

A lot has been written about work-life balance and I am reluctant to add to the volume of words.  On this subject, as on many others, I think that everything has probably already been said and we are now engaged in reordering and repackaging a fixed number of thoughts and ideas.

 

Portfolio Working

 

Instead I will present some musings based on my own life and work.  I gave up my full-time paid job as an employee with a professional body nearly fifteen years ago to take the great leap into what then seemed like the void of self-employment.  Having read Charles Handy, I styled myself a portfolio person and began to make use of my extensive network of contacts.  I consulted various books of wisdom to see what I could learn about the dos and don’ts of self-employment and collected a lot of advice.  Much of the advice, as advice usually is, was contradictory and a lot more seemed like simple common sense.

 

But as time passed I realised the importance of sometimes acting against common sense.  Many of the wise books wrote about the necessity of dividing one’s time strictly between work and leisure (or should that be between work and life?): of having clearly defined boundaries.  But as I tried to put this idea into practice I did indeed find that work became juxtaposed with life, although my intuition told me that the two are inseparable.  Now if it’s a nice weekday morning I like to get up ridiculously early, check and send some emails and then visit my local café for a coffee and a read of the Guardian newspaper.  If this results in my working at 10 o’ clock in the evening, on Saturday or Sunday, or even (heaven forbid, some would say) on ‘holiday’ then so be it.

 

My advice to any portfolio worker is: As far as it is in your power to choose, if a disciplined way of working, with strict boundaries, suits you then adopt it, and if it doesn’t then don’t.  I read of a man who gave up his full-time job to become self-employed and found self-discipline almost impossible.  After some weeks he hit upon the answer to his problem.  He would get up at the time he used to when employed, put on his suit, leave the house, get in his car, drive round the block and re-enter his house.  Then he felt truly prepared for work!

 

Part of the perceived problem of the work-life balance comes about through regarding work as the stuff you do, often reluctantly, to earn money to do the things you really want to do.  Again Handy (2001) has some good ideas about looking at work in different ways.  There is indeed paid work, but there is also home work (that’s housework), gift work (or voluntary work) and study work (part of lifelong learning).  But Handy’s wife, Elizabeth, has an even better idea.  She calls all of this “getting on with things”.

 

There is a long history - see, for example, the 2 500-year-old Bhagavad Gita (Mascaró, 1962) - of work being regarded as a spiritual practice.  We are complex physical, emotional and spiritual beings forming, I believe, part of an infinite, boundless universe.  Within this world-view work can be seen as a way of nurturing the universe: giving back to it as a kind of offering some of what we have received.  Even the most routine and potentially boring of tasks can, if approached and carried out with a positive mental attitude, become forms of meditation or contemplation.  To despise work, as some people do, is to despise an aspect of oneself and the world, and despising anything surely results at best in sadness and at worst in depression or dis-ease. 

 

What do you do?

 

When people are looking for a job they have often already categorised themselves.  Perhaps a person considers herself to be an engineer, or a teacher, or a salesperson, or whatever.  And if there are no jobs immediately available as engineers, teachers, salespeople, or whatevers, then the person begins to panic.  William Bridges (1997) left his job as a professor of English to find other work.  It was difficult because jobs as professors of English were thin on the ground.  After some time it occurred to him that he had been defining himself in terms of his job instead of asking himself what he was good at, what his abilities were, what he would like to be doing, and so on.

 

Tom Lambert (1995) suggests that it’s a good idea not to show your job or profession on your business card.  The problem in giving yourself a role - or worse, allowing another person or organisation to assign a role to you - is that you tend to become that role and identify yourself with it completely.  Freeing oneself of roles is an important step towards accepting the work that one does as part of a process rather than as part of a jigsaw from which some pieces will inevitably be missing.

 

But there must be some golden rules to successful portfolio working.  What about getting everything down in writing as a formal agreement?  I once discussed doing some work with a new-media company.  I had seen the quality of their products and liked the people I was dealing with.  At the end of our discussion we agreed terms and I was asked if I wanted anything in writing.  I didn’t, and with a handshake we entered into what used to be called a gentleman’s agreement (now probably a gentle person's agreement).  Suppose I get ripped off?  Suppose I rip the company off?  I like to believe there is still a quality called ‘trust’ and I would rather trust everybody and have my trust betrayed occasionally than trust nobody and be forever suspicious.

 

But how can some of these approaches be applied to the traditional non-portfolio life?  After all in most contexts we are indeed assigned roles, along with job descriptions, targets, performance criteria and company rules.  Employers - even often the most enlightened ones - can use these and other mechanistic devices to keep control, operating the workplace as a Cartesian machine rather than seeing it as a fluid and dynamic process.  How often do we witness the collapse or seizing-up of large, complex organisations as a result of a piecemeal approach being taken to their running?  Adopting a systems approach, and realising that an apparently insignificant action taken in one part of an organisation can have highly significant results in other parts, seems beyond the capability of many of today’s senior managers.

 

Denis Waitley’s (1995) advice to the employed is this: “You must act self-employed, but be a team player…Start thinking of yourself as a service company with a single employee…never equate your personal long-term interests with your employer’s.”  Whenever I hear the word ‘flexibility’ I am on my cynical guard, because I think the person uttering it may be an employer wanting employees to do more work for fewer benefits - except the benefit of increasing his company’s profits or his own share options, of course.  If you are self-employed, in reality or in Waitley’s sense of the term, then it is you who controls your own flexibility and suddenly it becomes a positive self-empowering concept. 

 

Changing Patterns

 

The perceived trend over recent years has been towards multi-tasking and away from the concept of a job for life.  But like many perceived trends this one is now being seriously challenged.  Portfolio workers are still a very small proportion of the overall workforce and there is really no evidence that their numbers are increasing.  Also doesn’t the very idea smack of a certain élitism?  It’s all right for so-called knowledge workers to present themselves as a new, dynamic, mobile breed of people, but what about the people who actually do most to hold the fabric of society together.  To coin a phrase: What about the workers - teachers, doctors, nurses, police, fire-fighters?  I wouldn’t like calling the police only to be told that the local PC can’t attend the scene of the crime because he is presently engaged with another aspect of his portfolio.

 

All generalisations are dangerous, including this one.  Theories, new management techniques, fancy organisational structures: they all come and go and what we have left are individual human beings trying their best to survive and, they hope, prosper in a world which has always been complex but seems rapidly to be becoming more so.  My answer to the question about living and working is certainly that I work to live.  Work, both as a concept and as reality, has developed negative connotations because it has come to be seen as something outside us to which we are subject.

 

Life is always presenting us with apparent contradictions and paradoxes.  We are told that we can’t have our cake and eat it; we must choose between this and that; we must decide upon work or life.  I believe we must reclaim work as an integral part of life and see it as interwoven with other aspects of what we are and what we do.  For me the inner life, so often neglected in the seemingly non-stop world of today, is at least as vital as the outer.  We need time, among all the routine busy-ness, to reflect on the priorities for achieving wholeness in our own lives whilst allowing others the same privilege.  Maybe when we see the illusory nature of the work-life balance concept we shall be on the way to achieving the sort of social transcendence that Marsha Sinetar (1986) talks about.  I’ll leave you to reflect on her list of abilities shared by socially transcendent people.  Perhaps you are fortunate enough to be one already.

 

• The ability to reinterpret the self more truthfully in the context of a whole world-view: individuals alter their way of seeing themselves, the way they relate to others, work and the community.

• The ability to manage resources - time, money, community services, etc. - creatively and efficiently.  The individual starts to control the various resources of life rather than being at the effect of them.

• The ability to let go of conventional pressures for achievement, material goods, status symbols in favour of more intrinsically meaningful things, activities and goals.

• An ability to tolerate more ambiguity, change and not-knowing.

• The ability to merge self-and-other interests.

References

 

Bridges, W. (1997) Creating You & Co.  London: Nicholas Brealey Publishing.

 

Handy, C. (2001) The Elephant and the Flea.  London: Hutchinson.

 

Lambert, T. (1995) High Income Consulting.  London: Nicholas Brealey Publishing.

 

Mascaró, J. (trans.) (1962) The Bhagavad Gita.  London: Penguin Classics.

 

Sinetar, M. (1986) Ordinary People as Monks and Mystics.  New York: Paulist Press.

 

Waitley, D. (1995) Empires of the Mind.  London: Nicholas Brealey Publishing.

About the Author

Graham Guest offers individuals and organisations coaching and consulting services, at the heart of which are simplicity of living and clarity of communication. His background is in management and administration, and he has experience as a career and life coach, a psychological counsellor and a consultant on continuing professional development.