Building a foundation of balance
A strategy to work hard without burning out and relaxing without guilt.
You can do anything, but not everything.
David Allen
Hard work is required to create a fulfilling life, but if we never stop to enjoy it, there’s no point in working so hard.Similarly, if all we ever do is relax, we won’t have anything worth enjoying.
We know we need a foundation of balance between hard work and leisure, but choosing the right path at the right time and feeling confident in our choice is much easier said than done.
When we choose to push ourselves to create the life we want, it feels like everyone else is sitting around enjoying themselves and we’re missing out.
When we choose to enjoy ourselves and relax, it feels like everyone else is outworking us and getting ahead.
There is no one-size-fits-all balance of hard work and leisure, but we can become smarter about when we choose to push forward and pull back by identifying which season of life we’re in.
Seasons of life
If we’re young and single we’re in a very different season of life if we’re middle-aged with kids, but seasons of life occur on multiple timescales. There are macro-seasons of life that occur at the scale of years or decades and there are micro-seasons of life that affect us on shorter time scales like injuries, break ups, moving, or the weather.
In the face of all this complexity it’s tempting to choose a simple time-based heuristic for balancing hard work and leisure like “lock in Mon-Fri and enjoy the weekends” or “Dry January”, but these fail us in the long-term because they can’t adapt to the variance we experience from overlapping timescales.
Seasons layer on top of each other and push us in different directions at the same time. This makes it impossible to predict or plan when we should push hard to create the life we want and when we should step back to enjoy the fruits of our labor.
Instead, we should assess what season of life we’re in every day and adapt our long-term plan based on how we’re feeling, the same way athletes adjust their training plans to how their body feels on a given day.
To make meaningful progress toward worthwhile pursuits we need to adjust our plan to our season of life, and we need to define what “enough” means for us.
Defining enough
Defining what “enough” means to us is one of the core challenges in deciding when to push forward and when to pull back. We can define “enough” as simply as meeting our basic needs or as grandly as creating a lasting legacy.
No definition is right or wrong, but if we don’t understand our version of “enough”, comparison clouds our judgement. If we’re unclear about what’s important to us, when we see others working harder than or relaxing more than us, we always feel like we’re making the wrong choice.
Understanding when to work hard and make sacrifices and when to relax and enjoy ourselves makes life more fulfilling. It allows us to work hard without burning out and enjoy our downtime guilt-free.
Prompts
What is “enough” for you? Do you need to raise your bar? Or lower it?
What season of life are you in right now? Does it make sense for you to push harder or pull back?
When you’re firing on all cylinders, what does a day look like where you’re pushing yourself forward? When you’re not at your best or you’ve earned time to relax, what does a day to recharge and enjoy the fruits of your labor look like?
Deep Dive
The 5 Types of Wealth by Sahil Bloom
A simple guide to defining and measuring what’s important in your life.
Thanks for reading! I’ll see you next Sunday.
Kevin