The Myth of Balance: Why Business Owners Must Design Their Lives, Not Divide Them

There is one cruel mystery about what is popularly known as “work-life balance”. If balance is where, for example, work goes on one side and life on the other, then an entrepreneur’s job is to keep both pans perfectly in tune. But anyone who has actually created a business will know that this is a political and professional fiction; a terrible, dishonest falsehood.

Entrepreneurs are not working 9-5, or 50-50, or Yes 40-60, nor should they be.’ Business does not work in increments called days. Business will surge, wax and wane and take days out on the weekend. The most successful owners are not the ones who reach some anointed period of balance, but the ones who stop trying and instead begin to re-schedule.

The Problem With “Balance” as a Goal

Balance means you’ve arrived and you’re living there forever. But a company is a living organism, and it shifts all the time week to week, sometimes hour to hour launches, a customer’s crisis, hiring decisions. They don’t happen to coincide with the sweet spot of 60/40 in your home vs. your office. Thinking on the destination of balance guarantees the owners will feel insufficient forever, because the scale can never stay long enough in one place to call it “done.”

The distinction between burnt out and thriving founders is not that the thriving ones work less they often work just as hard. It is their intentionality that differentiates. The thriving founders are able to select available options rather than default to whatever the organization wants.

Redefine Success Before You Redefine Your Schedule

Most talks about balance begin with schedules. They should begin with values. An entrepreneur who hasn’t clearly explained a vision of what a “successful life” is, outside of revenue goals, will naturally cite work, since it is the loudest, most trackable demand in his environment. Who cares if dinner with the family does not produce an invoice; sleep does not produce a quarterly report? But if he hasn’t created his own set of personal success measures before long his business will claim every moment he can spare for it (and even the moments he can’t).

The fix isn’t a improved to-do list. It’s a written set of parameters around success outside the business – whether it’s being able to make it to the bed time every night, having completely off unbroken weekends 2 times a month, or just having the head space to think without a notification continually distracting you. If that hasn’t been defined, then no scheduling ipso facto will work.

Build Systems, Not Willpower

Owners tend to think of overwork as a discipline problem, as if you can ‘try harder’ to get out on time. This is a misconception about small business. A small business owner can be the ‘in’ and ‘out’ point-of-disaster for dozens of daily decisions. Willpower goes down hill under daily willpower-drain. Systems do not.

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It means that one should be willing to put the early work into unglamorous tasks such as delegation, documentation, and establishing decision rights. If all the tough calls have to go back to the business owner, he will never have any real relief. A business that operates solely by one person’s unrelenting focus is not a business; it is a full-time job dressed up as one. True balance is achieved when a business owner can heave a sigh of relief that he has found a process or a person he trust enough to relinquish responsibility.

Protect Time the Way You Protect Cash Flow

Entrepreneurs will naturally instinctively excel at protecting capital we plan ahead and track spending way more than we have mastered tracking our own time. Very few will do so with the rate at which we use up our only truly non-renewable resource: our time. Begin to treat your own dates with the same level of commitment that you do with your clients. Think of myself as a commitment not a mere aspirational goal. If it’s booked on the calendar as a dinner date rather than “I am planning to leave early if the day allows it “it doesn’t stand a chance against that looming urgent email from the VC.

The Owner Is Also an Asset

Maybe the most profound change of all philosophical. Managers are taught that they are the heart of the enterprise. Engines should be work in the clock. But the manager is an asset that is either accumulating value, or it isn’t, based on the nature and quality of its upkeep. Rest is not a retreat from the business. It’s an up keep of the ultimate proper instrument of the business judgment inventiveness patience, and the ability to lead under duress.

Work-life balance as a fixed, level scale is a myth. Work-life integration, as defined by the foundation of purpose, systems of delegation, protected seasons, and transparent seasons is not a myth. It is just a more challenging, more specific design. A design that can create a sustainable life not a perfect life.