Hey, Reader

I hope you're having a great start to your week, for many of us in the Northern hemisphere, the last one before the holidays. I've been writing this piece about the work-life balance myth, as it's been on my mind for a long time and because it is super present in my clients' lives. I hope it opens up a new perspective.

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⚖️ The scale is the wrong metaphor

This idea of work-life balance suggests that the underlying structure is a SCALE and that work and life are two parts of our lives that are really separate, sitting on each side of the scale. It is the most unhelpful mental model, and it's keeping us stuck and suffering. Because, in this metaphor, on one side, there is work, and on the other, there are ALL THE OTHER THINGS in our life. And all the other things in our life combined do not outweigh the work. Can you hear it? All of the other things combined do not outweigh the work. All in the name of productivity. And I have a beef with it.

Some context...

This article is based on a few core experiences in my life. The first one was in January 2016 when, one day, suddenly (but also not), I hit a stress wall. One morning, during a meeting with my then leadership team, my life unravelled after months of pressure, trying to balance a large team of 20+ people and two small kids while commuting 2 hours daily and keeping everyone around me happy. I wrote about it here. The way back to recovery was long and painful, but I’ve learned to disentangle from one myth - my work does not define my worthiness. Nothing does. I am worthy because I exist. And so are you, even if you don’t lift a finger for the rest of your life.

Knowing when to pull the plug

The second moment of reckoning (in the best possible way) was when, in 2019, I was working for an innovation consultancy, Vertical Strategy, here in Copenhagen, and we were bought by Bain & Company - one of The Big Four (management consultancies, that is). I was in charge of integrating our leadership development and people processes with Bain's global HR team in San Francisco. I grasped pretty quickly that the performance culture we already had in the small company was about to be accelerated by the nth degree. I didn’t believe in it. A few months into the integration, we started merging our reporting processes, including a weekly temperature check around work-life balance, manager effectiveness, team effectiveness, and the rest.

I don’t even remember all the measured parameters, but it was comprehensive. In the first week’s report for Scandinavia, with 500 consultants across offices in Copenhagen, Stockholm, Helsinki and Oslo, the AVERAGE working time was 74 hours per week. The work time expectation was 55 hours a week, but as I could see, one thing was what was on paper and another what was practised. One of the questions in the survey was: “Did you get your free night this week?” - A “free night” was considered going home at 19.00. One night per week! (Meaning - working even later all the other nights). I’m not sure if people were single, had au-pairs or just extremely patient co-parents, but I knew I wanted to pick up my kids from school and spend time with them. It was non-negotiable. And so was sleep.

It all sounded absolutely absurd to me. So, I drew this pie chart of my life and divided it into the different activities (see pic for the original drawing). I knew already then that I wasn’t staying, but drawing it out like this was instant clarity. I worked with the 55-hour assumption, mind you. As a designer, presenting information visually always leads to a deeper understanding. So, seeing it, I remember thinking: “They want to own my life. And they think they can buy it with a high salary.” (I was supposed to be promoted to Senior Strategic Design Manager during the merger).

My inner rebel at the ready, it was an immediate “fuck no” for me. I could see myself getting depleted all over again and lying in my bed in a foster position in the middle of the night like the first time, with compulsive thoughts and heart palpitations, begging for it all to stop. I’d promised myself that would never happen again. So I got out. This was the most extreme version of the skewed work-life scale I’ve ever experienced or - heard of. But it is the origin of my perspective here, and I wanted to make you aware of it so you can also question where your origin story lies when considering how to work and live in more conscious ways.
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The history of the work-life separation

To really understand the separation of work from life, we have to revisit history briefly. As hunter-gatherers, we lived on the land that fed us. The “work” was to hunt for and gather food. In pre-industrial farming society, people lived off the land, worked the land and took care of animals - in a cyclical way. In the spring, they would sow and then nourish the growth. In the summer and autumn, they would harvest, and in the winter, they would rest, just like the soil and do crafts. Periods of work and rest flowed with nature’s cycles and rhythm, with the rituals and ceremonies dedicated to nature. So, work was an inherent part of life, and there was no need for separation.

The (post-) industrialisation era

The Industrial Revolution changed this significantly as people started travelling further away to work at factories. With the invention of factory machines, large numbers of people were needed to operate the machinery and aid in production. Natural cycles were replaced by the clock, and both work locations and hours were set. This is the era where our mechanistic perspective of work was established. Because we literally became an extension of the machine. After work, people would go home again, so there was work “over there” and life “over here”, and there was “work time” and “not-work time”.

I want to mention two people in a line of many who have contributed to this idea of productivity, which we still cling on to today. The first is Frederick Winslow Taylor, an American mechanical engineer who was relentless in trying to optimise labour costs in the steel works factory, where he was the chief engineer. Because people weren’t working "hard enough", labour costs for the company increased. So, by treating workers as units of productivity and effectivising their working processes to optimise said productivity, he invented the method of “scientific management”, effectively becoming the first so-called management consultant.

Many other leaders and policy-makers contributed to establishing this standardised way of working, including the "8-hour" workday established by Henry Ford in his factories in 1914. Over time, as office-based, white-collar work grew, particularly in the post World War II era - the separation between work and life, the 9-to-5 job and weekend time off, became even more entrenched. One’s life was, of course, arranged around adults’ working time. We traded our time for a salary, with profits flowing upwards to benefit a few at the top of the organisational pyramid. Though work has evolved and reshaped in many ways since then, and not least during the pandemic, this legacy still shapes how we think about work being separate from life and how we value productivity and organisational effectiveness above all else. ​
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The unworthiness trap

But the biggest lie sold to us with this “productivity obsession” is the narrative that our WORTH is tied to what we produce, how much we output, and what we achieve. It doesn’t matter if we don’t get to see our kids, our families, or take care of ourselves as long as the machine keeps going. So we forsake relationships, play, hobbies and rest because we haven’t yet EARNED the time off, so we have to hustle and prove ourselves some more. Any failing on our part is seen as an individual issue, a weakness and a moral failure. Please read Tricia Hersey's book Rest is Resistance.

In this separation narrative, we also keep our “work” and “life” selves apart. So, we enter this realm of “professionalism”, where we slip on a mask when we go to work, keeping our private and professional parts strictly apart, while we play the game of intricate balance. No wonder we are massively disengaged, depressed, stressed the hell out, and “quiet quitting” (God, I hate that term). You can find the numbers on engagement levels in Gallup's State of the Global Workplace report. It is particularly dire for managers.

The system keeps us so busy and exhausted that we don’t even question how this metaphor is exactly what keeps us stuck in this impossible game. And so we repeat it until something breaks (and as we know, it’s usually our health, relationships or families). So, the soul and meaning are squeezed out of our lives.

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Where do we go from here?

Here is my take. We don’t need a work-life balance. We need to reintegrate work into our lives in more conscious ways. De-throne it, so to speak, and allow other, more important parts of our life take center stage. It means reimagining the whole paradigm and writing an entirely new story. Stop drawing pie charts with separate chunks. Instead of the scale, how about we reimagine life as a woven fabric where each thread matters equally and makes up a beautiful pattern?

We need to reclaim our time, sense of worth, play and connection to the natural rhythms from the grip of the current system. It means divesting from perfectionism and obsession with machine-like productivity, realigning with the natural cycles and occasionally doing nothing, maybe getting bored again. It’s embracing the art of “dolce far niente” - the sweetness of doing nothing, as my Italian ancestors would say.

Because we deserve to be our whole human beings and live wholesome lives, and the things we would get from living in a different way, is something that a 74-hour work week, no matter how well-paid, can never give us. It was never meant to, and it’s time to realise that the void we feel can never be filled by working and consuming more but by creating space in our lives to do fulfilling things that contribute to our families and communities.

And as leaders, it is our job to go first. We can't do it alone, so we need to create communities that live a different example, possibly local ones.

It also means to dare to reimagine things. I’m longing to rebuild “the village” - the West, including Denmark, is devoid of it. What if we worked the land, grew food, contributed to local communities and rekindled the old ways of living native to the respective lands we are in? And what if the money we earned would also go back to nurturing the land and communities around us? Denmark has a history of co-operatives, so it's a great place to start, and I'm digging into it.

Choosing integration over balance isn’t just a personal lifestyle decision; it’s a political and cultural stance. And maybe this stance means we can live in a way that really supports our individual and collective well-being. Maybe we can even change the purpose of our economies from profit to well-being. (This is the exact reason why I recently studied at the alternative school of economics - story for another day).

I dream of a future, where our work nourishes us, our lives and our communities. What about you?

With love 💚✨

Martina
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Curious poke Why do you work? What role does work play in your life? What aspects of your working life still feel shaped by a clock-oriented, mechanistic view of "labour", and how might you begin to shift toward more natural rhythms? What assumptions do you have about "good work" and "normal"? If you were to start from scratch and could do anything, what would you create for yourself - and our shared human collective?

I am a fellow creative leader, a certified Co-Active coach and a strategic designer. I bring 20 years of experience and expertise in digital innovation, experience design, leadership and education.

I help stressed creative team leaders reclaim their creative confidence and self-belief to shape cultures and work that matters (and have fun with it again). Together, we create new possible futures. ☀️

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