I went to dinner with my friend James last Friday night and we eventually started talking about work. James works in private equity and has a relatively demanding schedule. Whereas most people are exhausted or frustrated by their long workdays and worry about losing their work-life balance, it was refreshing to hear James’s take.
He said, he feels like most people usually waste their free time. But when you work such long hours, you don’t have that option. Every minute of free time matters. And the first thing on which you spend that free time isn’t leisure. First comes the necessary basic chores just to stay healthy—getting groceries, going to the gym, doing laundry.
James said there was a period during his first year in banking when he was leaving the office at 2:30am, going to the gym, taking a shower, and then a quick nap before being back in the office at 7:30am. And he did this for 2-3 weeks straight. During that time, he said, even 5 minutes of free time seems like a gift—like a rare resource that must be spent wisely.
One could even argue that there is a quantifiable value to be gotten from spending your time, just like the value you would get from spending money on a product or service. When James spends his 5 minutes of free time, he seems to get more value out of those 5 minutes than someone with more free time on their hands than they know what to do with. They might waste that time watching TV or just twiddling their thumbs deciding what to do next.
To draw a more abstract conclusion from this specific example, there seems to be a definition of work-life balance that is not based on time, but value, when we consider that more time spent on work can bring greater value to the rest of your life.