Are you out of balance?
You can have balance in your life. But you have to understand what it is. You have to set your expectations correctly. And then you have to act accordingly.
What Balance Is
First, let’s look at what balance is.
Balance is dynamic
A person who has physical balance is constantly shifting.
The easiest way to picture this is to actually get up and stand on one leg for a minute. That’s a surprisingly long time. While you do, you’ll notice that the muscles in your leg are constantly adjusting to keep you in balance.
And it’s not just the muscles in your leg. It’s throughout your body. Your whole body is working to keep you in balance.
Likewise, someone who is standing, walking, or running is making tiny changes all the time to keep in balance.
What that means is that you never “achieve” balance and then stop working at it.
Balance is more than just work/life balance
While at Microsoft, I worked on Outlook during the time the Office product underwent a huge visual refresh that notably included the fluent ribbon UI, which replaced the old menus and toolbars. I remember working with Jensen Harris, who led the redesign across Office, as I was one of the three or four developers who worked on the ribbon for Outlook. He has since moved on to startup life, and had a great thread on work/life balance recently.
The main point he made is that work/life balance is a false dichotomy. Work and life aren’t separate, and they aren’t the only things that make up life. There is work, family, hobbies, side projects, church or civic concerns, friendships, and lots of other things – they’re all part of life, and we value some balance across all of them.
Balance is determined by your expectations and values
Whether you feel like your life is in balance or not is totally dependent on your expectations and values.
If you want a family, but don’t have one, then you’ll feel out of balance. But if you don’t want one, then you’d feel out of balance with a bunch of kids running around.
I have a hobby of playing and building in Minecraft. I spend twenty to thirty minutes a day on it. But I know others who would feel seriously deprived if that’s all the time they could spend playing.
Again, the comparison to physical balance can be useful. Balance when you are on a tightrope looks very different from balance while running a marathon, which looks very different from balance while breaking through the defense and going for the end zone.
What your goals are will determine what balance looks like for you.
Balance is completely individualized
Actually, it goes beyond just your goals. Balance will also depend on your strengths and weaknesses. On your interests, your personality, and the environment around you.
Balance is a completely individual thing.
It makes no sense to look at someone else and be jealous of their supposed balance in life, or conversely, think you’ve somehow got it figured out and they should follow your example.
It’s far too individualized for that.
Principles of Balance
Given all that, let’s explore the principles that lead to balance
Balance requires constant feedback
Remember, balance is dynamic. That means you can only maintain balance by getting constant feedback.
We get this physically through two main sources: sight and our inner ear. Sight is pretty straightforward.
But the inner ear is a marvel. There are small tubes with both fluids and small hairs that act as sensors. When your body moves, the fluid adjust based on gravity, causing the hairs to move. These movements all get sent back to your brain and allow you to respond very quickly, autonomously, to tiny deviations in your balance.
The feedback loop is the key to balance.
You need sources of feedback in your own life as well. I’ve talked before about how daily planning can give you some of that feedback. It can be your inner ear. For larger scale adjustments, a weekly or monthly retrospective can operate like your sense of sight.
Balance is best maintained through small actions
When you’re way off balance, you’ll need to take large corrective actions.
Most of the time, though, your actions will be smaller. Although you’ll never achieve the stillness of perfect balance (remember, it’s dynamic), the closer you are to that the smaller your corrective actions will be.
So if you’re looking at your life and feel like you’re pretty close, don’t overreact or overcorrect.
It may be tempting to avoid doing anything. Unfortunately, that will just mean that you’ll need to take a large corrective measure later.
Learning to make small corrective actions based on feedback will take time.
Balance happens best in the context of the week
And now I’m going to contradict my last point. Because all truth comes in complementary pairs.
When you’re moving forward, balance is also about rhythm. And so focusing on small actions or small moments in time can get in the way.
Imagine stopping and trying to consciously find your balance mid-stride. You would just fall down. Or at the very least lose your momentum.
So if you’re walking, the rhythm, your walking pace, will dictate adjustments to your balance.
And so in life. Life happens in natural rhythms: the day, the week, the month.
Balance across all areas of life mostly happens at the week level. Any given day might be full of one thing: work, or family, or even a hobby.
But if you neglect any one thing for over a week, you’re probably getting out of balance.
So a weekly retrospective, where you go over the different areas and responsibilities in your life, can be really valuable when it comes to maintaining balance.
Balance can exist over long periods of time
Finally, long periods of imbalance are also natural and ok. Balance across your life means you’ll naturally spend your childhood being quite self-focused, doing little real work, and often being taken care of. You’ll still be self-focused as a teenager and a twenty-something, but also more productive, learning and growing. The thirties and forties tend to be more about career and family responsibilities (thus “work/life balance” concerns. And so on.
Imbalance for a period is perfectly reasonable, as long as it’s deliberate. Starting up a new business, a new family, or a new hobby all take extra effort, time, money. Some months or years of imbalance makes complete sense.
As a funny little side note, I’ve always wanted a dog. Maybe having a dog is part of my idea of a balanced life. But with four kids, a busy career, a home to take care of, and a wife who isn’t all that keen on the idea, I’ve accepted that the dog days in my life are in the future, probably after some of the kids have left home.
I’m totally at peace with the idea. If someone got me a dog for my birthday, I’d probably find a good owner for it. And then come back to the idea in a few years.