Work-life balance; It's not the 50's anymore

The wall between our working and non-working lives continues to shrink and in some cases disappear. Who/what do you blame?

One villain might be the technological "conveniences" such as the home PC and the mobile phone. It used to be hard to work at home because so much of what we needed was at work. If we were at home we were more than likely going to be doing things other than office work. But that was before Excel and Word-equipped laptops and PCs became as common in the household as toasters. More common in fact, when was the last time you saw a home with more than one toaster (let alone a 22" flat panel toaster)?

Similarly, phone calls into the office used either just ring and ring or they'd go to an answering service. These days, who doesn't have a cell phone? This makes you always reachable--not necessarily a good thing.

But how did it used to be before technology turned our off hours to always-on? Using 50s and 60's TV shows as an example, I don't remember Dick Van Dyke bringing work home or the dad in Father Knows Best being unavailable for a father/daughter chat because he had an evening conference call. Furthermore, the moms were always available since they didn't work. It was a very clear delineation.

But according to Jared Sandberg of the Wall Street Journal, the above single-worker structure really only existed for a brief period in the 50's:

For thousands of years, work and family weren't separated. Children helped supplement income and women participated in barter, producing, for example, extra butter for trade. At the same time, men engaged in social support of their children. But in '50s and '60s, men were expected to devote themselves entirely to work and women entirely to home, says Stephanie Coontz, author of "Marriage: A History."

"This was the only period in history when so many people lived this way that you could afford to design your social and work policies on this assumption," she says. The problem is, those policies have hardly changed to reflect today's dual-provider families. Employers and governments, she adds, "are stuck in this brief period -- the 1950s."

But perhaps like the self-indulgent generation that we are, we're exaggerating how much and how hard we are working.

For one thing, people often forget to factor in how much non-work activities they do while at work. Think of all of the online shopping, emailing friends, IM'ing, vacation planning/booking, checking sports stats, etc. that happens during the normal workday.

Yes, people are working more during what were traditional free time hours but they are also doing more free time activities for time that used to be reserved for working.

Another indicator that the work-life balance isn't as bad as we might think is the results of research on the amount of leisure time we have today versus previous periods in history. More from WSJ:

The time spent working during your lifetime has, on average, dropped steadily, to roughly 20% from 50% in the late 1800s, says Jesse Ausubel, director of the program for the human environment at Rockefeller University. Today, Mr. Ausubel estimates, as much as 90% of the population is working less than ever, having "enormous amounts of time for leisure" and accounting for tourism and recreation booms.

What does this mean to you? Excuse the cliche, but remember the saying about no one on their deathbed ever complained about not spending enough time in the office. Since you're not on your deathbed, turn off the cell phone and laptop the next time your kids want to be around you or, if you are an empty nester, the next time you want to do something for yourself. If you feel that you have too much work on your plate to be able to afford this luxury, first make sure you are really being as efficient as the office as you should. If you are, then it's time to have a talk with the boss--a topic of another posting.