No Balance: A New Way to Survive the Chaos of Tasks
Posted: Wed Jan 29, 2025 7:04 am
Doing work on time, fulfilling the plan, growing professionally, and also spending time with family, playing sports and taking care of your health - today it is fashionable to be on time and prosper everywhere. That is why the concept of work-life balance is so popular. It was, until work came to many people's homes in 2020. Now balance has been replaced by integration.
The article will be useful for those who, with varying success, try to combine professional achievements with a variety of personal affairs. It will also be useful if you dream of getting more done and not feeling guilty in front of your family for doing something for work early in the morning, late in the evening or on weekends while walking with your children in the park.
A short background
As people around the world have had to learn to live and work in the same place since the uruguay whatsapp list pandemic began, maintaining carefully constructed boundaries between the two has been a challenge for some. For others, the boundaries themselves have ceased to exist. Both can be damaging: the struggle for work-life balance can be too energy-consuming, and the jumble of work and personal tasks can paralyze any activity.
At Megaplan, we have long understood that in the modern world, balance is possible only in words, but in practice it is of little use. The streams of information that fall on us like an avalanche every day make our brain work non-stop and unconsciously correlate the acquired knowledge with work tasks. By the way, we also made the latest version of the Megaplan mobile application taking these trends into account: on the eve of the transition of most companies to work from home, we already talked about work-life symbiosis , that is, the need to work while living and live while working.
Then we started going back to offices, but not to the old way of thinking. Many started working on a mixed schedule, showing up at the office several times a week. So the question of how to divide or combine professional and personal responsibilities became even more pressing. For those looking for an answer, time management experts advise paying attention to the concept of work-life integration. We tell you whether it suits everyone and how to apply it. We also share our experience of building boundaries between two important areas in remote work mode.
What is work-life integration
A concept that suggests that work and personal life are intertwined. Its main principle is to focus less on the concepts of "workday" and "personal time" and to concentrate on when and what tasks are most convenient to do. Within the framework of work-life integration, each task that needs to be completed during the day is part of a single process.
Those who practice this approach distribute professional duties, household chores, self-care, childcare, and pet walking in a way that is convenient for them. For example, they solve personal issues in the morning and work on business issues from the middle of the day. They make and check task lists before going to bed or on weekends, and at the same time check personal messages during the workday. The goal of work-life integration is to help a person achieve the desired state of harmony.
No Balance: A New Way to Survive the Chaos of Tasks 1
Interestingly, the competing concept of work-life balance has the same goal. Only work-life balance is about achieving an ideal state, when personal life and work are reliably separated and develop equally well and independently of each other. Recently, the concept has been increasingly criticized: with the transition of a large number of offices to remote work, it has become extremely difficult for their employees to organize everything so that one activity replaces another according to a strict schedule. However, some people manage to do this very well even when working remotely.
The article will be useful for those who, with varying success, try to combine professional achievements with a variety of personal affairs. It will also be useful if you dream of getting more done and not feeling guilty in front of your family for doing something for work early in the morning, late in the evening or on weekends while walking with your children in the park.
A short background
As people around the world have had to learn to live and work in the same place since the uruguay whatsapp list pandemic began, maintaining carefully constructed boundaries between the two has been a challenge for some. For others, the boundaries themselves have ceased to exist. Both can be damaging: the struggle for work-life balance can be too energy-consuming, and the jumble of work and personal tasks can paralyze any activity.
At Megaplan, we have long understood that in the modern world, balance is possible only in words, but in practice it is of little use. The streams of information that fall on us like an avalanche every day make our brain work non-stop and unconsciously correlate the acquired knowledge with work tasks. By the way, we also made the latest version of the Megaplan mobile application taking these trends into account: on the eve of the transition of most companies to work from home, we already talked about work-life symbiosis , that is, the need to work while living and live while working.
Then we started going back to offices, but not to the old way of thinking. Many started working on a mixed schedule, showing up at the office several times a week. So the question of how to divide or combine professional and personal responsibilities became even more pressing. For those looking for an answer, time management experts advise paying attention to the concept of work-life integration. We tell you whether it suits everyone and how to apply it. We also share our experience of building boundaries between two important areas in remote work mode.
What is work-life integration
A concept that suggests that work and personal life are intertwined. Its main principle is to focus less on the concepts of "workday" and "personal time" and to concentrate on when and what tasks are most convenient to do. Within the framework of work-life integration, each task that needs to be completed during the day is part of a single process.
Those who practice this approach distribute professional duties, household chores, self-care, childcare, and pet walking in a way that is convenient for them. For example, they solve personal issues in the morning and work on business issues from the middle of the day. They make and check task lists before going to bed or on weekends, and at the same time check personal messages during the workday. The goal of work-life integration is to help a person achieve the desired state of harmony.
No Balance: A New Way to Survive the Chaos of Tasks 1
Interestingly, the competing concept of work-life balance has the same goal. Only work-life balance is about achieving an ideal state, when personal life and work are reliably separated and develop equally well and independently of each other. Recently, the concept has been increasingly criticized: with the transition of a large number of offices to remote work, it has become extremely difficult for their employees to organize everything so that one activity replaces another according to a strict schedule. However, some people manage to do this very well even when working remotely.