Nikos Vasileiou

April 18, 2021

About Work - Life balance

The importance of maintaining a healthy work life balance is a hot topic for modern businesses. What I am challenging on this post is the terminology around it.

Reading all around topics on “Work-Life Balance” I cannot help imagining a balance scale, where on one side we have “Work” and on the other side we have “Life”, competing each other as being two different, distinct things.

Could this imply that “Work” is not “Life”? Or being at “Work” is not living your “Life”?

I guess not, and this is not the intention, but I would prefer something more well defined, like “Work - Family balance” or “Work - Personal time balance” or something better overall that does not imply the previous statement.

Being at work should be part of life, being at a work where it makes you a better person and contributes to your personal growth IS life.

What is NOT living your life at work looks like? Treating Friday as a blessing, and Monday as “blue”. Is this happening to you? Then I guess it’s time to take the leap and change your life through a better job that will make work a complementary part of your whole being, interacting with colleagues that will be there for you, have a true positive impact, something that you can take home and make you a better person in your family, a better friend in your circle of friends.

The company I work for is very respectful and sensitive on safeguarding Work - Life balance for it’s employees. Sometimes I can hear fellow managers over-protecting employees from working outside working hours. But I sense that for some people, myself included, violating the “Work - Life balance rule” COULD happen because of being so passionate about what we do, which I guess is ok... it should be ok... because being passionate about something is “living” the hell of out of it...

Nikos Vasileiou
Head of Engineering

About Nikos Vasileiou

Hello friends!
I am Nikos, CTO at Transifex & co-founder of Team O’clock.

I’ve created the Agile Squads framework and co-authored Hey Authors, a blog aggregator for the HEY World community.