If you’re an employee, it’s very likely that you work within a standard model: the famous 9 to 5. 5 days a week we wake up and show up at the office for 8 hours straight to deliver what we’re paid for. Before the pandemic our personal life could hardly be part of that routine because working from home was not really a thing. It was an exception, a favour or at best a privilege but far from being a right. I feel like the pandemic made us question this very established way of working. As work physically interfered in our personal life (welcome the work station at home), we started to reconsider what it really means to be able to balance Work and Life together. What if I want to do groceries when I have a break? What if I want to do the laundry when I have a creative block? What if I want to make my sport or spend more time with my kids in the middle of the day and finish my work later in the afternoon? Those are the questions we couldn’t have asked ourselves before because it was hardly conceivable. In a recent video, Simon Sinek introduces us to this ‘’smooth transversality’’ where you can make your professional activity work in your personal life: ‘’Work IN Life’’ as he states it. A situation where your can make both work together without pitting one against the other. ‘’I believe that you’re able to build a life where work and personal life become not only interchangeable but smooth. What I mean by that is that they’re not necessarily confined by hours in a day but rather where I choose to give effort.’’ I strongly agree with that, when you have more flexibility to get your life together when you need it, you have more brain capacity available for work. Something for companies to consider and for employees to make it viable by setting conscientious boundaries.
‘’The problem with our predictions is that we treat each task like it’s a novel problem. We construct a story about how we will complete our work but ignore evidence from similar projects we or other people have done in the past.’’I can highly relate to this statement based on my past experiences. I have that nasty habit of wanting every project to be a fresh new start and imagine that everything will go smoothly this time. But that’s a big fallacy. I don’t really explain where this systematic reasoning comes from. I can’t say that I ignore the past projects but I kind of convince myself that with those past experiences I should be able to avoid or better manage the problems I already encountered. There is some pragmatism in there but mostly unrealistic hope. Because, of course, there are always new problems and especially complex situations we don’t have full control over. Predict and plan for the unknown is very difficult, but I’d like to tell my future self that I should always consider the part of surprises that comes with every project.
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1. Work IN Life
If you’re an employee, it’s very likely that you work within a standard model: the famous 9 to 5. 5 days a week we wake up and show up at the office for 8 hours straight to deliver what we’re paid for. Before the pandemic our personal life could hardly be part of that routine because working from home was not really a thing. It was an exception, a favour or at best a privilege but far from being a right. I feel like the pandemic made us question this very established way of working. As work physically interfered in our personal life (welcome the work station at home), we started to reconsider what it really means to be able to balance Work and Life together. What if I want to do groceries when I have a break? What if I want to do the laundry when I have a creative block? What if I want to make my sport or spend more time with my kids in the middle of the day and finish my work later in the afternoon? Those are the questions we couldn’t have asked ourselves before because it was hardly conceivable. In a recent video, Simon Sinek introduces us to this ‘’smooth transversality’’ where you can make your professional activity work in your personal life: ‘’Work IN Life’’ as he states it. A situation where your can make both work together without pitting one against the other. ‘’I believe that you’re able to build a life where work and personal life become not only interchangeable but smooth. What I mean by that is that they’re not necessarily confined by hours in a day but rather where I choose to give effort.’’ I strongly agree with that, when you have more flexibility to get your life together when you need it, you have more brain capacity available for work. Something for companies to consider and for employees to make it viable by setting conscientious boundaries.