The laptop feels cold against my hospital gown as I hastily type a work email. I had unexpectedly been hospitalized for a blood platelet disorder and was preparing for my second round of transfusion treatments to address the issue. While I had alerted a few of my colleagues about the emergency hospitalization, I felt the need to do some work while the nurses prepared my next treatment.
I was supposed to be at a meeting, and here I was, laptop in a hospital bed, making sure I wasn’t disappointing people instead of tending to a more important matter at hand. I sent out a batch of emails from my hospital room, thinking of all the inconveniences this unexpected thing might cause my co-workers.
Ten minutes later, I received a text from a colleague:
“Get off your work email while you’re in the hospital, FFS! (Also- I hope you’re seeing improvements!!!)
Reading those words, especially as a scholar who researches and writes about burnout and work life, was an eye-opening experience. I had realized in that moment that I was not practicing something that I preach — we have to establish and maintain proper work-life separation.
Work-Life Entanglement
Our contemporary workplaces have increasingly ushered in confusing and entangled relationships to the work we do. For many of us, the boundary lines between where our work begins and where our personal lives end are an opaque horizon. The entwined domains of work and personal life create the impression that we, as workers, should be ever-available and more productive.
The COVID pandemic contributed considerably to this entanglement process. Forced to find creative ways for workers to continue their work from home, workers and workplaces collaborated on methods that blended the work-personal life domains. Now, it is often expected that people be able to do some of their work away from the workplace, and increasingly, people have jobs that are fulfilled entirely from home.
The flexibility to attend to one’s work-related responsibilities has been a boon for most workers who get the chance. Those who can do at least some of their work from home tend to report higher job satisfaction and be just as, if not more, productive.
Problems arise, however, when there is a clear lack of separation between our personal lives and our work-related responsibilities. Technology has heralded the possibility of doing even more work from any location. We have broadened the spaces in which people can do their work, but we have not accounted for an equally important factor: when and how often should people work in this manner?
When workers feel they must constantly be available to do their work, work becomes a psychologically exhausting context, if for no other reason than there is no sense of escape from it. This is made worse by workplaces where the exemplar worker is the person who allows work to infiltrate most of their life without objection. So what can be done about this?
The Myth of Work-Life Balance
When I go around conducting trainings on resisting burnout in the workplace, I often get asked how one can find a work-life balance. My answer is usually simple but frustrating: You don’t.
The idea of work-life balance sounds good on paper. Our task, as workers, is to find a harmonious relationship between work and our personal lives. In effect, our task is to distribute our work and personal life equally. My personal responsibilities are balanced against my work responsibilities.
Our contemporary workplaces have increasingly ushered in confusing and entangled relationships to the work we do. For many of us, the boundary lines between where our work begins and where our personal lives end are an opaque horizon.
Work-life balance, however, would only be possible if my workplace were fully aware of all of my personal needs and my personal life were fully aware of my work obligations and burdens. In other words, a harmonious relationship between these two domains of my life would require that they interact in a way that makes them aware of each other.
Another glaring issue with work-life balance is that it presupposes a static, balanced relationship between work and our personal lives. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Sometimes, in my personal life, my needs take priority over my work. There have also been times when my work needs to temporarily take on a greater focus. This dynamic shifting means that, at certain times in my life, work-life is purposefully unbalanced. If someone in my life dies, my biggest concern is not how I’m going to balance this with my job. At least it shouldn’t be the primary concern, in my opinion.
Work-life balance, as often proposed by workplaces, is subtle language suggesting that our personal lives need to accommodate the weight of our work — that our personal lives need to rest against the expectations of our job, but rarely the reverse. Consequently, we are seeing the work domain bleed into our personal lives in problematic ways. It is for this reason that we do not need to aspire for work-life balance but need to establish work-life separation.
Work-Life Separation
As the boundaries between work and personal life continue to blur, largely due to work obligations, it is important for workers to advocate for work-life separation. The boundary lines need to be as clear as possible.
One starting point for this kind of negotiation is the distinction between access and availability. Let’s use email as an easy example, since many of us use email for work. It is vitally important that workers have ACCESS to email if this is a communication framework used in the workplace. But email (and communication/productivity tools like Slack or Discord) creates a problem relevant to work-life entanglement; you can send an email at any time and from any place. This gives the impression, if we are not careful, that communicating with the person in this manner means they are near-constantly available.
Work-life balance, as often proposed by workplaces, is subtle language suggesting that our personal lives need to accommodate the weight of our work — that our personal lives need to rest against the expectations of our job, but rarely the reverse.
I’ve seen this in many workplaces where electronic communication is treated as ubiquitous availability— expecting people to respond to us as quickly as possible. We treat email, for example, as if we are walking into someone’s office at any time or day, expecting them to be available for us. And this is why these communication tools can be so exhausting.
This distinction between accessibility and availability is critically necessary in our technological world. The common practice of video conferencing, electronic systems for paperwork, communication apps, and collaboration programs has made work easier to access. But we need to stop assuming this makes people available.
We’ve made so many of these systems so friction-free that we tend to overuse them. When you have to go to someone’s office to ask a question, you are more judicious because the person is not always available. But with electronic versions of these behaviors, we often assume speed and efficiency are the most important elements of our electronic interactions.
Work-life separation recognizes that my availability has to be anchored to realistic standards (and hours). If I’m doing work constantly, all hours of the day, then the lack of separation is produced by overworking. Incidentally, this is often what workplaces expect. That, with additional access technology, they expect greater availability. But this needs negoiated for worker wellbeing.
Work-life balance also misses another important factor. Sometimes things need to be unbalanced — on purpose. If I have a family member in the hospital, I don’t want work-life balance; I want my personal life to take priority. Work-life separation also supports this notion. Sometimes our work responsibilities need to be strategically deprioritized.
Assessing Your Work-Life Separation
I recognize that work-life separation is not the norm in our society. Work in our society was historically founded on indentured servitude, slavery, and child labor. In other words, worker exploitation is our cultural heritage when it comes to the relationship between worker and workplace. But we can all make incremental changes to workplaces and work cultures by strategically challenging assumptions. And one of the assumptions many workplaces make is that access is the same as availability.
I encourage people to assess the degree to which they have work-life separation.
Here are some points to explore to get you started:
1. Do I feel like I have to be constantly available for coworkers, clients, customers, and administrators? If so, what contributes to that feeling? How does my job encourage this?
2. What kind of work-life relationship is being modeled by leadership and exemplar employees? Is it expected that one sacrifice their personal life in service of the work?
3. What are the anticipated reactions if appropriate boundaries are established in this workspace?
4. How might I contribute to work-life entanglement? Are there things I do the create or maintain this type of relationship to work?
5. Do the people in my personal life feel deprioritized because of my work?
6. What might be one small thing I can do or advocate for that could contribute towards greater work-life seperation at my job?
Keep in mind that work-life separation is a work culture issue. We all need to keep our expectations grounded in the realities of reasonable progress. Changing the work culture takes time and persistent effort.
Many of us unknowingly contribute to work-life entanglement, and it may take time to change this dynamic at your workplace. Fears of productivity costs, workplace conflict, and tarnished professional image are all natural obstacles that ought to be faced.
The more we are able to, little by little, establish clearer, more defined separations between our work and personal lives, the more we will be able to establish the psychological distance needed to recharge from the stressors of our job. Ironically, this will allow us to be more productive at work while also enjoying a more enriching life outside of the hustle and grind of work. ∎