The integrator

I don’t seek work-life balance. That’s not because I’m some workaholic or beach bum. Rather, it’s because I think there’s something inherently wrong with the idea of work-life balance.

What is work-life balance supposed to be, anyway? Some 24hour day evenly segmented into eight hours for work, sleep and personal time? This balanced concept is unrealistic, and chasing some illusory sense of balance only leads to increasing the stress you’re supposed to be decreasing by being balanced.

Moreover, the idea of balance presumes control over our environment — that our work and life demands come in predictable patterns. But work has deadlines and families have crises, and sometimes more time is needed in one area of our life than the other.

For example, am I supposed to tell my employees during an important deadline, “Sorry, I need to go home for some ‘me time,’ ” or tell my wife, “Sorry, I can’t take our child to the hospital because I need to stay balanced for work”? No, that’s ridiculous.

Instead of having a work-life balance, I set work-life boundaries.

The concept of work-life boundaries is simple. As it says in our employee handbook, we strive to be 100 percent present at work and 100 percent present at home.

How a person pursues being 100 percent present at work and home is totally up to them. For example, Ellen Kossek, a professor at Purdue and workplace expert, suggests you could set boundaries by being a separator, an integrato or a cycler. Each is a different style of boundary setting. An integrator is someone, like our executive vice president, who blends work and personal time throughout the day. In his case, he will concentrate on business for a few hours, then attend to a personal event, only to come back to the office later in the evening to get more work done. This is his way of always being 100 percent present at work or concentrating 100 percent on personal time.