Dynamics of the New Work-Life Balance – An Unfair Reality

Life is unfair. We all know this. But that simple phrase also allows you to shrug it off and continue wandering through life without urgency. I’m here to bring that urgency back to you when you hear phrases like “you need a work-life balance”, “life is unfair”, or “there’s no rush”

There is less time than you think

To show you the severity of this situation, it is critical to provide the data. This great post will be the basis for much of the numbers I provide.

Whoever you are, I am going to generalize and say that you have an approximate 79 years or 28,835 days in your life. Here is the breakdown of what that actually looks like:

Data (toggle)

• Bed: 12045 Days (33 yrs)
• Work: 4821 Days (13.21 yrs)
• Screens: 4127 Days (11.31 yrs)
• Eating: 1583 Days (4.34 yrs)
• Romance: 395 Days (1.08 yrs)
• Socializing: 368 Days (1.01 yrs)
• School: 334 Days (0.92 yrs)
• Remaining: 3875 Days (10.62 yrs)

Observations

Sleep until you don’t wake up

• The amount of time we spend sleeping or trying to sleep is immense…
  • Sleep is incredibly important. If we can find a way to reduce the needed amount of sleep in our lives, we may be able to significantly increase our ‘free’ lifespan.

Work-Life Balance Who?

• Work (as expected) takes up a good chunk of our lives (even with an average work-life balance). A critical takeaway here is that the time spent working is about 2.5 years greater than our free time.
  • This is even more significant as we’d expect to retire at an average age in this study. This means that a disproportionate amount of our free time comes in our later days of life. I would be interested to see this chart, but maxing out at age 60.

The Curse of Technology

• Screens! This is the time spent on social media or watching TV. While not in the data, I’d assume > 90% of this time is not valuable. That logic means we are throwing away over 10 years of our lives to consume media.
  • This is one of the many reasons I feel like awareness into our actual time on this planet is critical to success. This demo shows an example of a solution I have been thinking through to help you remain active and deter you from throwing away your valuable time.

The Spice of Life

• While eating only makes up about 5% of our time, that is 5% more free time we can add if we are efficient. Rather than going out to eat, staying in can open you up to more personal time. Less driving to and from restaurants, less waiting for servers, less waiting for seats.
  • That last part made me think… how much time to we waste just waiting in lines? Well, the linked article had info on that too! 235 days!

Love and Friends – A Clash of Relationships

• About a year of our life dedicated to romance? That number sounded absurd to me until I looked into the source. This section is made up of romantic dinners/dates, buying gifts, and bedroom activities.
• The fact that we spend just about as much time socializing as we do being romantic is mind boggling to me. One person (presumably) is taking as much of our time as everyone else combined!

Time Flies When…

• While school feels like an eternity when we are younger, the time we are actually present in school is only about 1 year (assuming only primary and secondary school).

What is Left Over?

• All of that leaves us with about 10.5 years to decide what we want to do. I say that loosely because of the other tasks that are essential for some:
  • For those who exercise regularly, you are projected to do so for about 1.25 years.
  • The average person vacations and is on holiday for about 3 years.
  • Based on the linked article and this supplementary post, people are in the bathroom for nearly 2 years of their life. This could be getting ready, showering, using the toilet, cleaning the bathroom, etc.
  • According to US CB we likely spend another 1.5 hours behind the wheel of our car.
  • Let’s do that math again now… With those things taken out, you have 2.75 years to do you.
    • Not a lot of time right? Take into account that time after a long day of work when you are exhausted and you suddenly realize the value of our limited weekends. Is this what they meant when they said to have a work-life balance?