Exhale

We often hear about why work/life balance is important, how a few people are successful at achieving it (survivorship bias much?) and mostly how the majority of the world just struggles with this.

I used to be that hamster on that wheel too.

In February this year, I decided that I really wanted to run my first marathon this year. That goal soon become my primary goal for the year and helped reshaped my perspective on how I view work and life. My training for my marathon became the first thing on my daily and weekly calendar; my work just had to adapt to that. I didn't work any less than I did before, but I was optimising for something within which I had found purpose: running my marathon.

This played into one of the discussions that we keep having at Receiptful, which is how we can be "family-first" (which may mean different things to different people), where the basic idea is that our work needs to adapt to our lives. And not always the other way around.

All of this has lead me to come to the perspective that it's not about life and / or work. It doesn't have to be polar opposites. Instead everything we do is just part of life itself.

Cover artwork by Francis Taylor. Intro & outro music is "Warm Sunny Day" by sunchannelmusic.