I Don’t Want Work-Life Balance

Maybe it’s less about balance and more about making it all fit.

Photo by Anton Shuvalov on Unsplash

I was sitting at the pool with my laptop when an older gentleman gestured toward it and asked with a smirk, “Hard at work, or hardly working?”

“Definitely hard at work,” I said, with a wink.

The man chuckled. “I won’t tell your boss.”

“You can, I don’t mind,” I answered as he headed back to his lounger and picked up his Tom Clancy novel, which probably seemed much more appropriate for the pool.

But my laptop was appropriate for me. Because I was getting plenty of work done.

I just couldn’t do video calls (not without risking some HR complaints, at least!). Which meant I had the unexpected bonus of uninterrupted time without meetings or calls—and I was actually more productive because of it. I dug out of my inbox and finally offered feedback on a report that needed my eyes on it.

So what if I was doing it from the pool on an otherwise vacation day?

I’m going to say something controversial: I don’t like the idea of work-life balance.

Balance requires things to be equal. And it implies they should be separate.

That just doesn’t work for me.

I love my job. I’m lucky enough to work for a company I love, with a mission I’m passionate about. I’m also good at my job. It’s not all rainbows and sunshine. My job can be demanding, my plate is almost always full, and there are certainly days when I’m frustrated. Loving my job doesn’t mean I love every minute of it.

But I also love… a lot of other things in my life.

My daughters. My husband. My friends. This Substack. Travel. Volunteering. My never-ending TBR list.

And then there’s everything else that still has to fit somewhere. Laundry. Appointments. Errands. And the approximately 4,000 tiny administrative tasks required to keep a household and several human beings functioning.

I want to make room for all of it.

And sometimes that means the categories bleed together a bit.

I rarely, if ever, truly “sign off” for the night. When I’m on vacation, I almost always at least keep an eye on my email.

To be clear, I don’t think this makes me more dedicated or better at my job. No one is asking me to do it, and I certainly don’t expect my team to work the same way. Some people need—and prefer—clear boundaries between work and everything else, and I fully respect that.

That’s just not what works best for me.

What I value most is flexibility.

I travel often enough that completely unplugging every time just doesn’t work particularly well for me. Checking in occasionally lets me stay on top of things without coming home to an inbox that makes me immediately regret having left. It’s a tradeoff I’m more than happy to make—especially because it means I can travel more.

Apparently my pool reading isn't always romance novels.

And that flexibility goes both ways.

While my top priority at work is obviously work, life doesn’t disappear just because it’s between 9 and 5. Sometimes I make a personal phone call in the middle of the day. Sometimes I do something quickly for my Substack. Sometimes I duck out to grab coffee with a friend. If one of my daughters needs something, I deal with it.

And the same is true in the other direction. I don’t mind talking about work outside of work. My husband and I are in the same industry and know a lot of the same people. We talk shop quite a bit.

Work bleeds into life. Life bleeds into work.

And I’m increasingly convinced that, for me, that’s not a problem I need to solve.

I’m also very aware that I’m lucky to have the kind of job where this is possible. I have autonomy. I’ve spent years building trust. What matters is that I do my job well and deliver on what’s expected of me, not that every hour of every day looks a certain way.

That freedom is enormously valuable to me.

Because it lets me build a really full life around a career I also care deeply about.

Maybe that’s why “balance” has never felt like the right goal.

Balance makes me picture a scale, with work sitting on one side and the rest of my life piled onto the other, constantly requiring tiny adjustments to keep everything perfectly even.

It feels like something I’m supposed to keep score on, constantly tallying up which side got more of me. Work got an hour of my vacation, but I grabbed coffee with a friend at 2 p.m. on a Wednesday. I answered an email from the beach, but I also took a personal phone call in the middle of the workday. Am I supposed to keep track until everything comes out perfectly even?

Except… who cares?

Nobody is keeping score.

I’d rather zoom out and ask whether I’m making an impact and driving results at work, showing up for the people I love, making time for the things that matter to me, and building a life that I actually enjoy living.

If the answer is yes, I’m not particularly concerned about which category owned a random 20 minutes of my Tuesday.

I don’t want work-life balance. I want a full life—one with work I care about and people I love, projects that excite me, places I want to go, books I want to read, and entirely too many things crammed onto my calendar.

And I want enough flexibility for all of those things to coexist.

Which brings me back to the pool.

I was sitting in the sunshine, getting through a report that needed my attention without a single meeting interrupting me. Eventually, I closed the laptop and picked up a romance novel instead.

I still don’t know whether that counts as work-life balance. But I got the report done, and I got to spend the afternoon at the pool.

I’ll take it.