Nigel Marsh: How to make work-life balance work

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What I thought I would do

is I would start with a simple request.

I'd like all of you

to pause for a moment,

you wretched weaklings,

and take stock of your miserable existence.

Now that was the advice

that St. Benedict gave his rather startled followers

in the fifth century.

It was the advice that I decided to follow myself

when I turned 40.

Up until that moment, I had been that classic corporate warrior --

I was eating too much, I was drinking too much,

I was working too hard

and I was neglecting the family.

And I decided that I would try

and turn my life around.

In particular, I decided

I would try to address the thorny issue

of work-life balance.

So I stepped back from the workforce,

and I spent a year at home

with my wife and four young children.

But all I learned about work-life balance

was that I found it quite easy

to balance work and life

when I didn't have any work.

Not a very useful skill,

especially when the money runs out.

So I went back to work,

and I've spent these seven years since

struggling with, studying

and writing about work-life balance.

And I have four observations

I'd like to share with you today.

if society's to make any progress on this issue,

we need an honest debate.

But the trouble is

so many people talk so much rubbish

about work-life balance.

All the discussions about flexi-time

or dress-down Fridays

or paternity leave

only serve to mask the core issue,

that certain job and career choices

are fundamentally incompatible

with being meaningfully engaged

on a day-to-day basis

with a young family.

Now the first step in solving any problem

is acknowledging the reality of the situation you're in.

And the reality of the society that we're in

is there are thousands and thousands

of people out there

leading lives of quiet, screaming desperation,

where they work long, hard hours

at jobs they hate

to enable them to buy things they don't need

to impress people they don't like.

It's my contention that going to work on Friday in jeans and [a] T-shirt

isn't really getting to the nub of the issue.

The second observation I'd like to make

is we need to face the truth

that governments and corporations

aren't going to solve this issue for us.

We should stop looking outside.

It's up to us as individuals

to take control and responsibility

for the type of lives that we want to lead.

If you don't design your life,

someone else will design it for you,

and you may just not like

their idea of balance.

It's particularly important --

this isn't on the World Wide Web, is it? I'm about to get fired --

it's particularly important

that you never put the quality of your life

in the hands of a commercial corporation.

Now I'm not talking here just about the bad companies --

the "abattoirs of the human soul," as I call them.

I'm talking about all companies.

Because commercial companies

are inherently designed

to get as much out of you [as]

they can get away with.

It's in their nature; it's in their DNA;

it's what they do --

even the good, well-intentioned companies.

On the one hand,

putting childcare facilities in the workplace

is wonderful and enlightened.

On the other hand, it's a nightmare --

it just means you spend more time at the bloody office.

We have to be responsible

for setting and enforcing

the boundaries that we want in our life.

The third observation is

we have to be careful

with the time frame that we choose

upon which to judge our balance.

Before I went back to work

after my year at home,

and I wrote out

a detailed, step-by-step description

of the ideal balanced day

that I aspired to.

And it went like this:

wake up well rested

after a good night's sleep.

Have breakfast with my wife and children.

Have sex again.

Drive the kids to school on the way to the office.

Do three hours' work.

Play a sport with a friend at lunchtime.

Do another three hours' work.

Meet some mates in the pub for an early evening drink.

Drive home for dinner

with my wife and kids.

Meditate for half an hour.

Walk the dog. Have sex again.

How often do you think I have that day?

We need to be realistic.

You can't do it all in one day.

We need to elongate the time frame

upon which we judge the balance in our life,

but we need to elongate it

without falling into the trap

of the "I'll have a life when I retire,

when my kids have left home,

when my wife has divorced me, my health is failing,

I've got no mates or interests left."

A day is too short; "after I retire" is too long.

There's got to be a middle way.

A fourth observation:

We need to approach balance

in a balanced way.

A friend came to see me last year --

and she doesn't mind me telling this story -- a friend came to see me last year

and said, "Nigel, I've read your book.

And I realize that my life is completely out of balance.

It's totally dominated by work.

I work 10 hours a day; I commute two hours a day.

All of my relationships have failed.

There's nothing in my life

apart from my work.

So I've decided to get a grip and sort it out.

So I joined a gym."

Now I don't mean to mock,

but being a fit 10-hour-a-day office rat

isn't more balanced; it's more fit.

Lovely though physical exercise may be,

there are other parts to life --

there's the intellectual side; there's the emotional side;

there's the spiritual side.

And to be balanced,

I believe we have to attend

to all of those areas --

not just do 50 stomach crunches.

Now that can be daunting.

Because people say, "Bloody hell mate, I haven't got time to get fit.

You want me to go to church and call my mother."

And I understand.

I truly understand how that can be daunting.

But an incident that happened a couple of years ago

gave me a new perspective.

My wife, who is somewhere in the audience today,

called me up at the office

and said, "Nigel, you need to pick our youngest son" --

Harry -- "up from school."

Because she had to be somewhere else with the other three children for that evening.

So I left work an hour early that afternoon

and picked Harry up at the school gates.

We walked down to the local park,

messed around on the swings, played some silly games.

I then walked him up the hill to the local cafe,

and we shared a pizza for two,

then walked down the hill to our home,

and I gave him his bath

and put him in his Batman pajamas.

I then read him a chapter

of Roald Dahl's "James and the Giant Peach."

I then put him to bed, tucked him in,

gave him a kiss on his forehead and said, "Goodnight, mate,"

and walked out of his bedroom.

As I was walking out of his bedroom,

he said, "Dad?" I went, "Yes, mate?"

He went, "Dad, this has been the best day

of my life, ever."

I hadn't done anything,

hadn't taken him to Disney World or bought him a Playstation.

Now my point is

the small things matter.

Being more balanced

doesn't mean dramatic upheaval in your life.

With the smallest investment

in the right places,

you can radically transform the quality of your relationships

and the quality of your life.

Moreover, I think,

it can transform society.

Because if enough people do it,

we can change society's definition of success

away from the moronically simplistic notion

that the person with the most money when he dies wins,

to a more thoughtful and balanced definition

of what a life well lived looks like.

And that, I think,

is an idea worth spreading.