Now I am a father myself and, like so many people at work,
wrestle with that endlessly debated dilemma over how to balance the time I spend in the office with the time I spend at home.
But a funny thing has happened on the way to the latest
instalment of the work-life balance debate: a deep global recession. The work side of the equation has been downsized. A lot of people suddenly have a lot more life on their hands and not enough of the paid,
toiling stuff.
Is less work a bad thing?
Listen to the voices of newly redundant workers, or of those being asked to work a three- or four-day week, who are rarely off the TV and radio right now. They do not want to spend more time with their families. They would like to be at work, getting paid for doing a full-time job.
This new reality had not quite got through to some of the
attendees at a seminar on work-life balance, which was held in London recently. We were there to mark the launch of an entertaining new book and to discuss some practical approaches to managing our working lives a bit better.
At one point I
lobbed in a question about the new chief executive of Yahoo, Carol Bartz, who, according to this newspaper, has a strong work ethic, reflected in the 18-hour days she
is wont to put in. One of the
panellists, Julia Hobsbawm - author of the new book and, I should add, a friend - said that there were moments in her life when a burst of workaholism did not seem like such a bad idea. Some roles, however, could be pretty inflexible and require a serious time commitment. A very good answer, I thought.
But another panellist, Stephen Palmer, a professor at City University in London,
took the bait. Ms Bartz risks being a bad
role model, he said. When leaders work such long hours it has an impact on other colleagues, creating a "long hours culture" in their organisations.
I suspect that Yahoo's shareholders will be quite relieved to hear that the company's employees are going to be encouraged to work pretty hard in the months to come. The employees themselves may be ready to put in an extra effort if it makes the difference between survival or collapse.
In
grumpy middle-age I am coming round to the view that much of the debate on work-life balance has been
misguided. If people hate their jobs I can understand why they might want to spend as little time doing them as possible. If work is physically or mentally exhausting there is a limit on how much of it you can do.
This is an easy thing for a "knowledge worker" who likes his work to say. But the biggest tensions seem to arise after the insertion of that dividing line between the words work and life. The search for an
elusive balance between the two can be as tiring as work itself. Work is life, as the late Studs Terkel said. We should rub out that firm black line that separates our lives and our careers. It creates a false choice, an either/or situation that can rarely be successfully resolved. Is this a
sure-fire recipe for workaholism? I hope not. I like spending time with my family, too.
Wedding tears
An example from a few years ago. In the 1960s, one of England's most successful football clubs, Tottenham Hotspur, was managed by an uncompromising Yorkshireman called Bill Nicholson.
A key quote gives a sense of the man: "Any player coming to Spurs, whether he's a big signing or just a ground-staff boy, must be dedicated to the game and to the club," Nicholson said. "He must be prepared to work at his game. He must never be satisfied with his last performance, and he must hate losing." This ethos helped the club to win eight major trophies in the space of 14 years.
His friends were amazed to see "Bill Nich", such a famously hard man, cry at his daughter's wedding. He explained that he had realised that he had hardly seen his daughter grow up, having committed so much time to his job, travelling around Europe and being away from home for so long.
Mind you, people who saw that Spurs side play always tell you what a great team it was.
13°C
9°C
20
%
12°C
80
%
10°C
60
%
70
%
