Kevin Appleton on work/life balance.

Kevin Appleton says those of us worrying about work/life balance are missing the point. We have to work, so just make the best of it and remember how fortunate we are.

When I started work and was deemed important enough to have my own workspace it came equipped with a phone (landline of course – no mobiles in those days), an in-tray (to which an internal mail person delivered my pitifully small amount of incoming mail each day) and an out-tray into which I would place hand-written work for processing by the typing pool within (if you were lucky) 24 hours prior to receiving it back for posting.

If I wasn’t at my desk, on my phone, or in a meeting, then nothing that looked much like work was getting done. Once I left the building in the evening my private life started and when I entered the building in the morning my work life started. Despite these many handicaps the business managed to struggle on and things got done (and the business survives to this day).

These days I look at my email on a handheld device pretty soon after waking and am occasionally berated by my wife for doing the same while we are (theoretically) watching the TV together in the evening. Occasionally something will demand that I deal with it there and then and I go into my ‘home office’ (didn’t have one of them 30 years ago either) to do so.

This has also spread to holidays – where I prefer to spend 20 minutes a day clearing down emails to coming back to an inbox full of hundreds of communications. I have found myself in client telephone conferences on the beach and conducting an interview in a coffee shop whilst on holiday in New Zealand.

And it’s not just me, or people at my level in business or stage of life. There are many youngsters these days who are regularly putting in twelve hour days or longer at their work, having just finished full-time education and who consider themselves lucky just to have a job.

So where does work/life balance come in? I’m afraid I don’t have a magic answer, but I do have a few thoughts which might be helpful to reflect upon.

1. Those of us living in the West are incredibly privileged and lead a lifestyle which, in material terms, is beyond the imagination of the 80% of the world’s population that lives on €10 per day or less*. For the vast majority of the world’s population ‘work/life balance’ is an irrelevant concern and we should be very careful to remember this when we are inclined to complain.
2. The development of modern communications technology has eroded the boundary between private time and work time in the West. However, it has made us more productive (I think) and means that we are, at least, able to afford leisure time to be disturbed in! If we had our cost base and lifestyle aspirations, combined with the developing world’s technology, then our economies would collapse instantly.
3. If we look for ultimate happiness and fulfilment in either work or leisure then we are looking in the wrong place. I have seen people make just as much of an obsession of their particular leisure ‘idol’ (following a football team, competing in triathlons, playing golf, collecting coins etc.) as other people make of their work. Both work and leisure are equally capable of robbing time and commitment from human relationships and from pondering on higher things (let’s call it faith) where I suspect true happiness and fulfilment might lie.
4. We all get it wrong. The people who seem most content to me are those who don’t spend ages agonising over whether there is a more meaningful life to be lived (if you’re agonising about that, go to church - seriously), but just get on with enjoying what’s in front of them and, as the saying goes, ‘doing things seriously, without ever taking them too seriously’.

Dear readers, very few of us will be remembered in twenty years’ time and one in a hundred years’ time. The book of Ecclesiastes is very practical and straightforward on the matter “there is nothing better for a man than to enjoy his work [note, not ‘find work he enjoys’) for that is his lot”. Most of us have to work to eat. That’s our lot. Let’s get on with it and make of it the very best we can.

(* World Bank development indicators 2008)

THE AUTHOR: Kevin Appleton is a former divisional chairman of Travis Perkins and was for many years CEO of Lavendon Group. He is currently a non-executive director of Ramirent. To comment on Kevin’s article please e-mail: [email protected]