Work - Life Integration

The first time I heard about Work-Life Integration, I felt relieved. I had tried ‘Work-Life Balance’ and found that it is a never-ending balancing act. When I tried to visualize Work-Life Balance, I ended up visualizing a trapeze artist!

But Work-Life Integration, I felt is more of an abstract term — similar to the integration concept in calculus — the limits sounded infinite!

Moving from Work Life Balance to Work Life Integration

Technology has opened up endless possibilities including the freedom to do work when and where we want. But along with it comes some of the unwanted consequences. The expectation is that we are always connected — not to mention even on holidays. With the evolution of Smart devices and high-speed internet connection from anywhere, it is probably a logical transition to the era of integration of work into our lives. It is no longer possible for most of us to start the day only at 9 AM and end it promptly at 6 PM. Working with teams across countries and time zones, we don’t want to be left out of what is happening after hours!

Limitless Integration

If I start counting the activities that I tackle in my daily life, I quickly realize the list is endless, especially for families with kids. Wake up to early morning work meetings, eat a healthy breakfast, exercise, drop-off kids to school, numerous firefights during the day, pick up kids from school, dinner, spend time with family, get more work done, work on personal growth, connect with friends, drop off kids for activities, plan career growth, plan get-togethers with friends, parties, charity events… the list is endless and so is the possibilities for integration.

Drawing Parallels

Spending years in corporate life, one thing I started realizing is that the strategies and tools we use at work are more or less an extension of those we use at home. While the business processes and tools are more organized and documented, at home we are using similar approaches in a less formal way.

As this article series evolves, we will explore the possibilities of a limitless integrated life free from the worrying thoughts of balancing acts.

Strategy 1: Mitigating Inefficiencies with Right Incentives

A classic example of prioritization seen often is that of the speed at which someone completes his or her tasks at work before going on vacation. The task that would have taken weeks gets completed in a day or two. When I observe my kids I realize that this a behavior we had from childhood. As a child, the priority and passion are to spend as much of time as they can play. When I give my children some chores to finish before they can start playing, I am amazed at the speed at which the chores get completed. No inefficiencies there!

This is the same strategy we can use to get through the mundane tasks at work and life every day. Have something that you really love to do at the end of the day and don’t restrict that to a time slot. When we have the incentive that we can spend all your remaining time in the things that we love to do at the end of the day, it automatically drives efficiencies in all our tasks during the day.

Strategy 2: Developing a Flexible Schedule Mindset - Agile in Life

After working in many industries and experiencing both high demand and moderate work cultures, one thing I have learned to do is to develop a flexible schedule mindset. When the working hours are not predictable, it is may not be easy to assign specific time slots to each of the activities.

One way to address this is to plan the goals for the week, but be flexible on the schedule to achieve it. For example, I want to spend 30 minutes a day to write an article. Most of the days I may be able to get 30 minutes in the morning. But some days I may have to find that time in the evening or not find at all. So my flexible schedule now says 120 minutes a week — which may translate into 30 minutes x 4 days or 1 hr x 2 days or 2 hrs x 1 day.

However, there is a caveat. Just the flexible schedule mindset will not be much effective without conscious prioritization of the goals for the week. This takes me back to the weekly organizing outlined in “7 Habits of Highly Effective People”. I need to identify the important activities for the week across the different roles I play so that I can push out the not important activities, have the time to attend to the urgent tasks and still find time for the most important tasks.

Does this sound familiar to what you do at work? Referring back to ‘Drawing Parallels’ that I outlined in the first part of the article, to me this is implementing Agile principles in life. For people familiar with Agile and scrum methodologies, prioritizing the most important activities or MVPs in the weekly sprint and pushing out the rest to the backlog for upcoming weeks/sprints that’s what we do at work. That’s what we can do at home as well.

Strategy 3: Planning and Prioritization - Maslow’s Hierarchy and 80 / 20 Rule

What is important in life is a question that comes up in everyone’s mind from time to time. A year or so back, going through some significant health conditions, this was the question I was frequently asking myself. At that time I was over driving myself with too many activities not paying much attention to what I was eating, not spending enough downtime to reflect on what I was doing. I was fighting fatigue, lethargy and over driven thyroid hormones. And as luck would have it if you don’t plan your downtime, you are forced upon some downtime by your body and mind.

The good thing about not so good time in life is that those times make you think. Now I had to go back to basics and prioritize what I needed from life. One framework that helped me reconnect my priorities is Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. I realized that if I ignore my Physiological needs like healthy food and exercise, I can’t meet the rest of my needs effectively. So I started looking at re-prioritizing my life putting focus on what I am eating and on leading a healthy lifestyle. That required me to slow down and cut down on the not so important activities from life. I am so glad I did that and I realized that out of all the activities I was chasing only a few very really important. The 80:20 rule applies at home as well! 80% of my time was being spent in chores which did not contribute to even less than 20% of what I wanted from life. A simple example is sorting through mails on the weekend and filing, spending at least a couple of hours a week. Moving all my statements to paperless aka digitization of records helped reclaim those hours and use for planning healthy meals for the week or spend more quality time with kids or myself.

Strategy 4: Delegate, Delegate, Delegate

Ability to to delegate is the corporate mantra that helps you achieve more at work. The same applies at home as well. The more tasks you are able to delegate to your support system, the more time you can spend on things that are more important to you. If you are a mom, it is key to build a strong support system around you which may include the spouse, older kids, nannies, tutors, house cleaners etc. Initially I was skeptical of spending money to hire help where I needed. Later I figured out that the freed up time helps me spend time on quality work that earns me more. The quicker you can figure out multiplying your hands through others, the faster you can start enjoying a better quality of life.