How I’m De-Monetizing My Understanding of ‘Work’

There is no ‘Work-Life Balance.’ There’s just Life.

In School of Kind Business, one of our key modules involves breaking down the percentage of time we spend getting paid providing our service to clients, versus the amount of time we spend on other vital tasks in our businesses.

It won’t surprise you that the amount of time you spend actually getting paid is usually a whole lot less than folks like to think.

But, in addition to that, there’s all the time and energy we spend in the rest of our lives, doing what I anachronistically describe as ‘chopping wood and hauling water’.

We plan meals and shop for groceries. We make the meals out of those groceries and clean up the kitchen. We clean the house; we do the laundry. We take care of the plants; we mow the lawn and grow the garden. We DIY home maintenance and repair, or we spend time researching the best contractor to hire. We care for the kids: play with them or home school them or taxi them to and from school and multiple activities. We volunteer at the school or community centre. We walk the dog. We help our aging parents with the stuff. We take courses to upgrade our skills. We practice specific self-care so that we are fit to do all of the above.

And probably a whole bunch of other stuff I’m currently forgetting, because my list is so long that by the time I ever get to the bottom of it, I forget what’s at the top.

My world as an entrepreneur and a woman running a household shifted radically when I started acknowledging every single task that fills my day—be that meal-making or email list programming or client care—as ‘work’. Everything but the actual leisure time spent watching Netflix, or reading, or playing at a hobby, or doing something social on a weekend. Everything.

(As I mentioned in last month’s Time Fairy post, I colour-code tasks in the calendar, sometimes retroactively. If I did a thing today, I put it in there. And boy, is that calendar full.)

Some of that work—actually a tiny percentage, as it turns out—puts this thing called money in my bank account, and (for now) that currency is needed to pay for some foundational priorities in creating a life I love: a life which includes having a comfortable shelter, healthy food, and clothes not made by children in a collapsing, planet-polluting factory.

But many parts of that work—a large percentage, as it turns out—are devoted to other forms of ‘currency’ that create a life I love: vibrant energy in my body; a peaceful healthy home; well-nourished intimate relationships; an engaged and curious mind; special meals that feed the soul as well as the body; a community I’m proud to be part of; beauty in my surroundings or draped on my person; artistic expression; looking after all my stuff so that I don’t need to earn as much money to replace it quickly.

In short: a lot of my work goes towards creating health, joy, beauty, connection and sensory delight for myself, and for those in my inner and broader circles.

To me, those are things worth working for. They are what make life worth living, for most of us.

And if they make life worthwhile, then the WORK spent generating these essential currencies of life is as valued as the flow of money currency to my bank account.

It’s all work. I can finally stop singing that refrain beloved by solo-entrepreneurs in a guilt-ridden, work-ethic-for-money-plagued society, “I didn’t get enough work done today.”

Conceptualizing it this way helps me make better choices. It helps me to prioritize on a given day, week, or season. It helps me to realize that if I want to spend more of my time and attention on tasks in one area -for example more work that makes the currency ‘money’- then I need to either: give up, postpone, delegate or staff the other tasks. Because there’s only one of me, and 24 hours in a day.

Instead of having ‘work’ then ‘errands’ then ‘housecleaning’ then ‘exercise’, I just have ‘work’, of various types. There’s no work-life balance. There’s just life, which is full of necessary and chosen work, that benefits me or other living creatures. Along with some delightful, nourishing moments of leisure, of course.

For me, a micro-entrepreneur, this is empowering. I have a set of tasks that need to be done for my own good, or the greater good. The creative iterations of how I might accomplish all of that are vast, if not infinite.

For me, as a 21^st century woman seeking to find my way in a grand social experiment of combining so-called ‘full-time paid labour’ with so-called ‘unpaid domestic labour’, this is honouring. It bulldozes through this polarity of paid/unpaid work, of self-worth positioned in ‘Earning.’ It helps turns my attention to the realm of simply showing up and being here, for whatever needs doing.

I’m curious: what are your associations with the word ‘work’? Does it mean ‘the career/job that makes money’, or something else? As a solo- or micro-entrepreneur, what self-talk do you have, about how you spend your time and energy?

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