Opinion Sur Joven

Do you often feel like your brain’s about to explode, that weeks go by too fast and that you lost track of your personal life? This article aims at analyzing the balance between professional growth, work accomplishments and personal life. Eight hours to sleep, eight hours to work, two hours to commute, two hours to eat… How much time is left for yourself?

Sol, an employee at a multinational company, comments: “Each December, at work, I’m given two engagement diaries: a desktop one and a portable one. The second one is about a sixth the size of the first. Without thinking twice, I leave the big one on my desk and carry the small one with me, and that’s how my year goes by. The largest diary contains my working life, and the small one my personal life”. Everyone in Sol’s company knows whoever starts working there will have to do it for long hours. Sometimes employees stay even longer than their bosses.

Overtime (which is not always properly paid) may be associated to several factors: corporate culture, lack of planning or inefficient human resources management. However, many times overtime is covered under the “passion for work” excuse.

Why do you work?

a. To make money.
b. To develop a career.
c. To evade my personal conflicts.
d. All of the above.
e. Other.

If you chose any of these answers, this article is meant for you. (Even if you chose option “e”).

Workaholics?

Here’s a currently common situation, published on the book “Tribes”, by Seth Godin.

“It’s four a.m. and I can’t sleep. So I’m sitting in the lobby of a hotel in Jamaica, checking my email. A couple walks by, obviously on their way to bed, having pushed the idea of vacation a little too hard. The woman looks over to me and, in a harsh whisper a little quieter than a yell, says to her friend, ‘Isn’t that sad? That guy comes here on vacation and he’s stuck checking his email. He can’t even enjoy his two weeks off’. The author then strikes back and asks: ‘Isn’t it sad that we have a job where we spend two weeks avoiding the stuff we have to do fifty weeks a year?’. Porosity in work relations is a fact. Sometimes technology, new working methods and the context don’t let us make a difference between free time and work.

But is it possible that some people are so passionate about work that they choose to spend time using their laptops to answer emails instead of enjoying they vacations? While writing this article, we posted a debate on Facebook about the balance between work, career and personal life. Somebody said: “The balance needs to be made between the things that are good for us, not between work and personal life… The difference is subtle, but it leaves work aside from a negative connotation… :-)". This statement confirms that the porosity between work relations and personal life is a fact. If I stop working I get depressed… I’m not good at managing free time. What do I do if I don’t work?

The other side ("I don’t want to be a rich yuppie”)

Not everyone needs to work 24/7 to be happy. Some people work only twenty or thirty hours a week and are happy about it. Juan José is a psychologist and works only two days a week. He doesn’t make much money, but it’s enough to make a living. He says he doesn’t need more. “To me, the important thing is to subsist; that’s enough for me. And I have a lot of free time, so I can go jogging, to the gym or take training courses to be a better professional”. In this sense, he makes it clear that his personal challenge is to be the best psychologist possible with his patients. “If I had to spend eight hours a day listening to people, I’d end up hating both my patients and my profession”, he says. Juan José has no children to support. That’s an advantage for him. But doesn’t care about other material aspirations either, such as a car, luxury trips, etc. He knows that if he works too much he won’t be able to be happy, and that material objects won’t replace his spiritual lacks.

Guillermo (40) is in a similar situation. He got a psychologist degree with an excellent GPA and today works at a public institution. Some of his former college mates believe he’s a bit stuck regarding his professional growth and every once in a while offer him temporary job opportunities to help him maximize his income and keep growing professionally, but he rejects them. “To me, the most important thing today is to see my kids grow up. I don’t see life as a staircase you have to be climbing all the time. I like my job, but I’m not passionate about it. But the important thing is that I’m not a slave: I work 24 hours a week and that’s enough to support my family”, he explains.

Regarding Guillermo and Juan Jose’s cases, working less is directly related to the fact that they prioritize their personal lives over work. But in certain circumstances, working less (or, actually, producing less) is closely related to the possibility of being efficient at what they do. In works related to art, journalism, literature, education, etc., free time is essential for the creative process. Can we say a journalist is working when he or she’s reading the newspaper? Must attending a training course be included within a passionate teacher’s work? Can making a coffee, listening to some quiet music and relaxing the muscles be included within the working hours of an artist who needs these conditions to generate his or her art?

‘The thin red line

Relations are porous, and few people leave work issues aside when they leave the office. Now they carry them in their Blackberries, their iPods or their laptops. So let’s see some conflictive situations:

* You have an extra vacation day due to flight delay. Should you connect to the Internet to work, in case you have a laptop?
* It’s Saturday night and you’re connected to some instant messaging program. A mail from you boss about a work topic you love appears in your inbox. Do you answer it? Do you type the answer and save it to send it later?
* Today we have cell phones with more and better technology. How does that influence our private lives?
* Shouldn’t employers be in charge of taking care of their employees’ personal lives? Would it be wrong to send them home when their working hours finish? Just as clock-in is controlled, shouldn’t clock-out be controlled as well?

The importance of the balance

In times of technology and automation, the most important value added a person may give at work (whether a freelancer or an employee) is probably his or her ideas. But when can a person provide better ideas? When they are exhausted, stressed out and full of things to do?

We believe the best state of creativity takes place when someone has time to free their mind, generate a blank and let the ideas flow. For Juan José, those moments usually happen at the gym, in the shower, when he meets with his friends or while commuting.

The value of work is given by the thoughts and the actions a person generates. That’s why it is important to give ourselves a space to relax, learn, think... Just as the title of the article describes it, work requires to be balanced regarding personal life. Many unemployed people end up -whether out of anxiety or boredom- suffering psychic or physical disorders; working excessively or without clear schedules may also generate problems.

Technological developments make work and personal life get mixed by using tools such as the cell phone, the laptop, etc. It’s important to be aware: if we can’t stop working, we’re probably concealing some underlying disorder such as an addiction (workaholism) or even a hidden depression.

These pathologies seem to be a circumstance of these times, perhaps the other side of the benefits provided by technological developments and networking. But they’re also the negative consequences of some misunderstood concepts regarding work worship, which we’d better reconsider.

Illustration: Lorena Saúl

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