Work-life balance is too important to be left in the hands of your employer

A really good TED talk by Nigel Marsh about Work-life balance: “How to make work-life balance work”. (10 minutes, subtitles in different languages.)

He shares four observations:

• certain job and career choices are fundamentally incompatible with being meaningfully engaged on a day-to-day basis with a young family.

• If you don’t design your life, someone else will design it for you, and you may just not like their idea of balance.

• We need to elongate the time frame upon which we judge the balance in our life. A day is too short; “after I retire” is too long. There’s got to be a middle way.

• Small things matter. (…) With the smallest investment in the right places, you can radically transform the quality of your relationships and the quality of your life. (…) if enough people do it, we can change society’s definition of success away from the moronically simplistic notion that the person with the most money when he dies wins, to a more thoughtful and balanced definition of what a life well lived looks like.