Why Work-Life Balance is a Myth

Are you ready to grow from stressed out solopreneur to confident CEO? You're in the right place. I'm your host, Rachel Cook, and I've spent the last 15 years helping women entrepreneurs to sustainably scale their life first business. If you're serious about building a more sustainable business, it's time to put the strategy systems and support in place to make it happen.

Join me each week for candid conversations about stepping into your role as CEO, the hard lessons learned along the way and practical profitable strategies to grow a life first business without hustle and burnout.

Hey there CEOs, Rachel Cook here, founder of the CEO collective and host of the promote yourself to CEO podcast.

I'm excited today to kick off a new series based on a lot of conversations I've been having over the last few months with peers and colleagues and clients talking about the things that are really holding women entrepreneurs back. Things that are the mindsets that people find themselves stuck in that become self sabotage.

They become the things that are keeping people from actually getting where they ultimately want to go in their life and in their business. And it's so insidious because a lot of these beliefs are so entrenched in every part of our society. And it's really hard to let go of them. It's really hard to do differently when this is how you were raised, this is what you heard growing up, this is what you heard in your jobs and in your traditional nine to five.

The reality is a lot of these are very outdated. A lot of the things we're going to talk about over the coming episodes are not what makes sense in today's day and age and the type of businesses that we all run. So over the next few episodes, I want to talk about why I don't believe in work life balance and instead focus on building a life first business.

We're going to talk about why hustle culture is holding so many people back and instead how to have a more sustainable approach to your business. We're going to talk about the productivity trap and why all of the things we were told to do to help us get more and more done are actually just causing us to be exhausted and burned out at a record rate.

And instead we need to let go of that productivity trap and do less but better. So this is going to be a fun series. I have some interviews with some great clients coming up too. I cannot wait to dig into all of these topics with you. And today we are starting with why work life balance is a myth.

Why work life balance is not useful or helpful as a concept for small business owners. It can be one of the biggest things that I find leads to guilt and burnout for small business owners, especially women business owners, because when we believe and buy into all of these concepts of having a balanced work life, we tend to start to feel like we're failing on all fronts.

Have you ever felt that way? Like you're trying to do great at work, but you're stressed and overwhelmed with that. And then you feel like you can't truly unplug because you're always stressed and overwhelmed with work. So when you're at home with your family, you're not fully present. You're checking your email.

You're worried. You're kind of distracted. You're not able to find enough time to take care of yourself because you don't really even have enough time to spend with your family. It's just insidious how quickly this can get away from us. So I want to start by looking back at the problem behind this concept and historically where it comes from.

Because I think the context is really important for understanding how we got here. How did we get to the point where people believe we could have eight hours of workday, eight hours of leisure time, which if you happen to be a parent, you know that the other eight hours of the day you're awake aren't really leisure time. That's when mom taxi is happening. And then eight hours of rest, eight hours of sleep a night. And we end up feeling like if we can't fit those, a third, a third and a third like that in our 24 hours perfectly that we are failing and we end up just feeling exhausted with the whole situation.

So let's talk about why this is such a flawed concept for most of us. And I think one thing - I love studying history. I look at business history all the time and how we got to this point, and I'm just going to give a very [00:05:00] high level breakdown of how we got to this eight hour workday.

Eight hours of work, eight hours of leisure, eight hours of rest. You've probably heard that Henry Ford was the person who pioneered that concept. And the idea was, hey, we need to make sure that the people who are working for us also have time to go spend that money and buy things from us. That's the myth, right?

The reality is, if you look even further back, a lot of labor legislation and labor laws really started coming into place earlier than that. Turn of the century when manufacturing was on the rise. And there were manufacturing laws in place to limit the hours that women and children could work.

Then we started to see a lot of laws come into place alongside of a lot of accidents. A lot of accidents were happening in these industrial manufacturing factories. We were seeing people getting hurt. We were seeing people die. We were seeing fires where people couldn't leave. We were seeing unsafe working conditions.

So all of that has led to, at the turn of the century, 1900s, early 1900s, a lot of people fighting for safer working environments. A lot of people fighting for there to be less hours to work. Instead of working 12 hours a day, six days a week, we need to work less because, as Henry Ford said, you need to be able to go out and spend the money you just made.

Really though, all of those industrialists ended up focusing on working less hours because they realized that there was a threshold after which increased the number of accidents and deaths and other horrible things that actually slowed down or stopped production in their factories.

So yeah, it sounds great that he was like, "Yeah, just work eight hours instead of the twelve hours," but really it's because they realized if they overworked people there were going to be more accidents. If there were more accidents and things going wrong, somebody loses a finger or an arm or there's a fire, it really slows down everything.

So this was a little bit on their part too. They're trying to protect themselves and trying to protect how they can keep their manufacturing going and have the most output as possible. And back then, the type of work they were doing, think about working in a factory. We all learned about Henry Ford's assembly line concept.

Basically, everybody stands in a line, on an assembly line, and everybody does the same part again and again. Very repetitive. Not really a lot of thought to this. Once you know how to do your part of the assembly line, you put this widget with that widget, put it together, pass it to the next person.

And you just do the same repetitive task over and over again. So it didn't require any thought, didn't require a lot of brain power, didn't require you to bring a lot of experience or education to the table because it was very repetitive in a factory. So then the Fair Labor Standards Act was passed.

It was established in 1938 and this is where we get a lot of the laws that we still have today that haven't really changed a whole lot. That's the act that established a 40-44 hour workweek, which was meant to be a protection again for workers to keep them from getting hurt, to keep them from working when they were tired. It was also a way that these industrialists could protect themselves against the errors that would happen once people got to the point where they were tired.

It also helped establish safer working environments and things of that nature. So then we jump another 40 years and we start looking in the seventies and eighties and more and more women are coming into the workforce. Baby boomers now have both the husband and the wife in a family working.

And this brought a whole new wave of talking about work life balance. This brought in a lot more conversation around that because now there was no longer always a person at home to keep life running. Now there were two working adults in a family. So we started seeing a lot more conversation around this.

But the conversation around work life in terms of both men and women working [00:10:00] originally was about how do we have more flexible scheduling? How do we have maternity leave? Or what became FMLA, Family Medical Leave Act. How do we make sure that if we are working eight hours a day that we can keep everything in our life going?

So a lot of this eight hours a day of work, 8 hours a day of leisure, 8 hours a day of rest has continued to be the dominant thought of how we should be structuring our days. But what we have found is as we've shifted out of manufacturing, as we've shifted out of making widgets on an assembly line into more knowledge based work, work that is based on our education, our experience, our expertise, which is what most of my clients are offering, we found that most workers don't need to be eight hours a day because they're not putting together widgets.

A very repetitive, simple task. We are doing much more complex work. Much more complex tasks that require a lot more brain power and focus and creativity. So we find now that the average knowledge worker is really only productive for about three hours a day. That's about the max that we really can stay super focused on the task at hand, if it is knowledge based work.

So that's a big difference between an eight hour workday, where you're making widgets, same thing, over and over again on an assembly line, versus three hours of hyper focused, creative, knowledge based work. Automatically, we start to see that this eight hour a day is not necessary. Because if we can really only focus on doing our best work for three hours a day, throw in another hour for all the administrative types of tasks that we all have to do.

At most four hours a day is what we have individually to show up a hundred percent. So that is my first big issue with the idea of work life balance, because it is simply focused on this idea of 8 hours of work, 8 hours of leisure, 8 hours of rest, that was very much based on doing simplistic, repetitive, manufacturing, making widgets types of tasks, and when you have higher level tasks that require creativity, strategic thinking, really using your brain to create the thing that you create or do, you don't have as much capacity to do that at the level that you truly want to do it.

So I find that a lot of people, because they were brought up in that belief that you have to work nine to five, when they become entrepreneurs, they kind of bring that along with them.

So I often find when I'm working with women entrepreneurs that we have to really break down and look at why we feel so stuck on the eight hour work day. I have a lot of small business owners who come to me and they're putting in more than 40 hours a week, like 50 or 60 hours a week. But they don't know where that time is going and they're exhausted.

They are just simply exhausted. But when they started their business, instead of looking at what it would actually take to do the work, what's required of them, how much capacity they need, they tend to just transfer this old approach based in the manufacturing age. They tend to just translate that 8 hour workday into their business without really questioning, is this necessary?

Without really questioning, is this going to help me ultimately get to my goal? And then when I start talking to them and I'm asking them, "Okay, what else is on your plate other than your work?" That's when we get into raising kids, running my home, managing my household, taking care of aging parents, managing my chronic health issues, trying to take care of myself, trying to make time for friends, trying to make time for my partner, all of those things.

And so people just feel like they're failing everywhere because they don't have enough time to really focus on the things that matter to them and to their life. So we don't have to do it. We don't have to do this. We can actually throw out the belief that to work hard means working 8 hours a day. [00:15:00]

Just chuck it right out the window. It does not matter. We have seen productivity has skyrocketed over the last 100 years. But our work habits have not changed. You have to think about these different tipping points. Look at how manufacturing went from humans on an assembly line putting together the widgets to then those manufacturers put together machines and computers and robots that could automate a lot of the manufacturing.

We saw a ton of that happening at the end of the 60s, the 70s, the 80s, all of those manufacturing plants for things like cars, that was actually revolutionized. And we went from everything being hand done by humans to a whole lot more being automated in these automated factories. So that was a massive explosion in productivity, but did they let people work fewer hours and get paid the same for the same output?

No, they had them working eight hours a day, having a massively higher output, but not tremendously increasing wages to go alongside of it. So who wins then? The owners of all of those manufacturing factories and companies. Then we had another explosion in productivity when we saw computers enter the picture.

Suddenly we went from doing everything by hand to having software that could manage all of your data and manage all of your calculations, software that could manage all your inventory, all the different things that need to happen in your business went from having to happen by hand on paper to now computer systems that can run it so much faster and smoother with less effort from the human.

But did that change how much time people were expected to be at their office? No, they were still expected to be there eight hours a day, even though there was an exponential increase in productivity and output. Did they get paid a whole lot more? Not necessarily. We have seen since the 70s and 80s that wages have not increased with the pace of productivity.

So we've kind of created this working class of people who have been able to become more and more productive as technology has gotten better and better. And at the same time they're not getting rewarded or compensated for that work, for that productivity. The productivity wins and gains are all going back to the owners of these massive corporations.

From computers entering the mix, then we see the internet entering the mix. And of course, another explosion in productivity. Now everything is available with just a quick Google search. And we're about to see this happen again when it comes to AI. We're in the middle of a huge, massive revolution of productivity.

When I'm saying productivity, I'm meaning the output with the same amount of inputs. So the output is going to increase even if you work the exact same way that you've been working, but from the working class, for working people, they have not received the benefits of these wins and gains in productivity, they've basically stayed the same.

Now as a small business owner, you get all the wins of increased productivity when you are able to increase your efficiency, increase your outputs with the same amount of inputs. You are able to capitalize on that and grow your business without working harder. But you have to understand how all these factors are at play.

So traditional work life balance really is a failed, flawed concept. This is not helpful or useful for anybody else. The idea of working 8 hours a day, having 8 hours of leisure time, 8 hours of rest, no longer necessary.

That was helpful a hundred years ago when we were all making widgets on a factory assembly line, but now it is not necessary for the types of businesses that we are running. So research shows that the average knowledge worker only really works three hours a day of productive work. The rest of the time is kind of filled up with other tasks that we have determined we need to do to keep busy, but they don't actually move the needle.

So I really encourage people to question everything about the way you've structured your business. Because often small business owners who had previous experience in a bigger, larger organization, kind of just bring those same habits over without questioning them. If you left a job where you were working 40, 50, 60 hours a week [00:20:00] and you didn't question it and then you start your business and you're like, "Well, this is just how work is done."

You're going to run into the same problems. You're going to run into feeling like you don't have enough time. You're going to run into feeling like there's not enough flexibility. You're going to feel like you're failing at showing up in your life because you're trying to fit a model that is outdated and not relevant for your business now.

And not relevant for where business is headed, especially with all these major advances we are having that make it faster, easier, less expensive for us to increase our results with the same amount of effort.

This is where my life first business approach comes into play. This is all about letting go of any of the old stories you had about what work looks like. I hear this a lot when people are saying things like, "Well, I need to work full time versus part time." And these are concepts that again, these weren't made for small business owners because as a small business owner, it doesn't matter how much time you work, if your business is structured correctly.

So the life first business concept is all about, instead of saying, "Well, I just have to work eight hours a day, five days a week, because that's what work looks like," instead, starting with what is your definition of success? What are your priorities right now in your life? And then how do we reverse engineer your business to support that?

I know it sounds very wild if you have always had to put your life in the little bits of time that you can find around your work. But when I work with my clients, one of the first things that I have them sit down and do is the exercise of what do you want your life to look like?

If you were to imagine you're a year in the future, what would your life look like day to day? What would you like to be doing? Don't think about work yet, but just be thinking about what are the things you want to do and focus on each day. So what are the priorities for you every day? How are you taking care of your health?

How are you spending time with your family? How are you showing up for yourself and just taking care of yourself? What about how are you making time for relationships? By starting there, then we can actually see what we have to work with. It's hard to build a life first business if you're starting with the business first. You always have to start with the life first.

So for me, I'll give you a couple examples here of how I've applied this to my business. And it's changed several times based on the stage of life I'm in and the stage of life my family is in. I can tell you that how my life first business looked when I had newborn twins was a little different than now that I have almost 15 year old twins.

Having high schoolers is very different from having infants. So it changes and evolves, but the core of it has kind of stayed the same for me. And if you've listened to my podcast for a while, you know how much I have prioritized time with my family and my relationships with my family and my kids, my husband.

And for me, that was the foundation. Creating my life first business started with actually just thinking about how do I want my day to go in this season of life? This morning I woke up, usually my husband gets up first because he lets our dog Savannah out first thing in the morning, and so he gets up and he makes coffee and brings me a cup of coffee right when he wakes up all the kids. And we kind of help the kids get ready for their day before he goes to do drop off and I spend an hour to myself while he's doing drop off.

This morning I spent an hour reading Ina Garten's memoir, which is fabulous, by the way. I really love her, but I spent an hour reading to myself and to me that is what I want my mornings to look like. I want to have a slow relaxed morning. I want to be there to help the kids get out the door, help them with what they need. Once Jameson takes the kids to school, I have some time to read or journal or do some meditation.

Usually I take that time. It takes them about an hour to drop all three kids off at school. I take that time to just kind of slowly get into my day and then he gets home and we go on a walk and then once we're done with our walk, then I get through the shower and get ready for my day.

But by then I have literally started my [00:25:00] day first with connecting with my family, taking a little bit of quiet time for myself, whether it's reading or journaling, reflecting in some way, connecting with my husband, going on a walk, taking care of my body. And now I have done three of my biggest priorities before I ever sit down at my desk.

That's huge for me. That's massive. Imagine how you would feel about sitting down at your desk if you really filled your own cup first. Because that's how I feel. I feel like I'm always sitting down full. Overflow is what I serve from, not pouring out from an empty cup. So I usually sit down at about 10 o'clock in the morning.

And then I know my youngest gets home at about three thirty. That's when the bus drops him off. So I've got until then, but that doesn't mean I have to work until then. I also know that for me, three to four hours a day is about what I've got if I'm going to be a hundred percent focused and work on big picture, high level thought work.

It takes a lot of effort to be this laser focused and I can only do it for short bursts of time because I'm human and this is true for all of us. Most of us can only sit and work in really focused blocks for maybe 30 minutes to 60 minutes, sometimes 90 minutes depending. So we really don't have the ability as humans to sit down and focus for super long stretches of time.

And I know that. So I work with that. I usually work for about an hour and a half to two hours in the morning from about 10 to 12. Then I'll take a break for lunch. I'll move around. I might run an errand and then I'll do another hour and a half, two hour chunk in the afternoon. I'm working with my brain, making sure it's rested, making sure it's clear in the morning, making sure I've taken care of myself.

Then I can get into a focus session in the morning from about 10 to 12. Then again, I'm giving it a break and doing other things and taking care of myself for an hour. And then I can get into another focus session for about two hours. And then I have gotten so much done within a single day. Think about that.

If you had two focused sessions a day of 90 minutes to two hours, how much more would you be able to accomplish if you were able to stay really focused? It's amazing. It also means you have to say no to a lot of stuff. I don't say yes to distractions. I have very clear boundaries around how I run my calendar.

Those focus days I just talked about, those aren't call days. Call days are structured differently. For me, call days where I have clients are structured where I have a call at 9 o'clock as a slot, at 10:30 as a slot, at 12 as a slot, at 1:30 as a slot. That's a lot. That's a total of four hours available for calls with a 30 minute break in between each one.

And again, that works with my brain. That gives me 30 minutes of buffer between each call so that I can reset myself. I found that was really important. So I think about these things because I want to work with my energy. I want to work with my brain. I want to work with how I do my best work.

For me, these types of hours work really well. I tend to be kind of a slow morning person and an early to bed person. I know some people are early birds and like to wake up and get after it super early in the morning. I don't. You won't see me open up my computer until about 10 and I'm also not a late night person.

So you're not going to see me up at 10 o'clock or 11 o'clock at night. I'm going to be pretty much doing these focus blocks during the day, and then by the time my kids are home, I am really able to shut it down and then focus on helping them with their homework and getting through whatever we have going on that afternoon.

And sometimes I'll have something going on where I'm able to, like tomorrow I'm going out to teach a workshop with a friend in the evening. I have plenty of time for all of those things.

So a couple of takeaways I want you to keep in mind when I'm sharing about this life first approach is it really is about thinking about what do you want your days to look like? What is an ideal morning to you? Regular day, not a vacation or anything, but like a regular day in your regular life, what does that look like for you?

I see a lot of people who struggle feeling really stressed out in the mornings, especially if you're trying to get your kids to school and get yourself to work at the same time. I realized that combination was a big stressor for me very early on when the kids were little. [00:30:00] So I just never tried to do both at the same time.

I realized only one person could get ready right now and it was going to be the kids. And then I would get ready once they were where they needed to be. And so I'm always looking at how can I make this easier on myself? How can I reduce the friction around this? So ask yourself how you want your morning to look.

Ask yourself, okay, how much time can you actually stay focused and do the high level CEO level work that only you can do? I'm not talking about answering emails and I'm not talking about the admin stuff. I'm talking about high level CEO work, the thousand dollar, 10,000 an hour work in your business.

This is work that demands focus. This is work that requires you to have your do not disturb on so you can't be interrupted. What does that need to look like for you? The admin stuff we can fit in anywhere. That is the tiniest little bits of this. But we have to prioritize the blocks of time for the big CEO level work.

And then think about what your afternoons or evenings are going to look like. For me, most of these are very centered around my family, my kids, but about once a week, either I'll have a night off where I'm with friends or doing some networking thing, or my husband will also have his night off a week where he goes out with friends or what have you.

But because I've sat down and looked at all of this and structured my week this way, I've made sure that my biggest priorities in my life are the first things that are on the calendar, are the first things that are getting done. And what happens is, these things compound for me over time. When I have these slow mornings and I'm starting my day by filling my cup, I have more energy, attention, and focus when I sit down at my desk.

When I have more energy, attention, and focus when I sit down at my desk for my two big meetings, work sessions for two hours and then a break and then two hours, I get so much accomplished. I am really able to move the needle very quickly. And because I have let go - I really had to deprogram myself on this one.

I have let go of the worry that I need to just sit down until I get a few more things done. My goal every day is to get one or two big things done. If I can get one or two big things done every day, I am winning. And I keep my list for what's on deck this week. I plan it out. I know how much time, energy, and capacity it takes for me to do most of the things on my plan.

That only comes with experience, but it makes it easier for me to manage it. And then at the end of the day, I'm literally going to cross off this second podcast that I recorded today. And then I'm going to be able to go, you know what? I am good. I can close everything down and enjoy the rest of my afternoon in the day without worrying about my business or feeling like I'm failing at everything.

So I encourage you to start thinking about, instead of assuming your business requires you to work eight hours a day or 40 hours a week, instead of that, if we let go of that assumption, and we started looking at how much time every day are you actually productive and able to do the CEO level work? If that's only three or four hours a day, then how do we set ourselves up?

How do we structure our day so that when you sit down to work, you're not overly stressed out because you were trying to do a million things before you started your work day? How do we set you up so that you've had some time to take care of you? To fill your own cup, to restore a little bit, to rest and recover and have the mental clarity you need to do that high level work.

How can we help you do that? How can you do that first? And then how can you start to practice the art of letting go of the feeling that you have to just keep checking things off the to-do list? As a small business owner, that to-do list will never end. It's always going to get filled up. As soon as you check one thing off, two more appear in its place.

So you have to really practice checking things off that to-do list and being okay with just getting one or two big things done at a time and making that meaningful momentum happen. But don't let all of the to-dos turn into something that steals time away from your family, or from your health, or from your rest, or from your partner, from anything else that [00:35:00] matters to you.

So we have a webinar coming up early in December. We're going to have a webinar coming up December 9th about the Life First Approach to building your business. I encourage you to RSVP to this live webinar, to this live training, because there is a level of unlearning that needs to happen. There's a level of deconstructing hustle culture, deconstructing capitalism in order to make your life and business be more harmonious. You have to learn how to let all those things go.

Because a lot of the mindsets, a lot of the habits that we all pick up over the years were built for people who lived over a hundred years ago, working in a factory, making widgets. It's really hard to deprogram this, it takes practice.

It takes a lot of practice to put new habits and new boundaries in place. But once you're able to do that, you will find a sense of this peace of mind, that you're exactly where you need to be, that you're making progress, that you have more than enough mental, physical, energetic capacity to do the work you want to do and show up for your family and show up for your health and show up for your life, because you showed up for those things first.

And I find that when we show up for the life things first, when we show up and take care of ourselves, invest in our health and wellbeing, invest in our personal development, invest in our relationships, those are all things that fill your cup and when you fill your cup first, when you live this life first way, when you fill your cup first, suddenly you're able to do so much more in your business.

It makes such a bigger impact in your business because it's not coming from a place of depletion. It's not coming from you literally sacrificing the last little drops out of your cup. It's coming from the overflow because you're regularly replenishing that mental, emotional, energetic capacity that you need, that physical capacity that you need when you prioritize your life first.

So make sure you head over to theCEOcollective.com/lifefirst and sign up for the upcoming webinar we are going to be hosting December 9th to help you implement a more life first approach. Remember, you deserve to have a life that you love and you don't have to wait until the day you're finally retired to enjoy it.

You should be able to enjoy it now. That should be one of the biggest perks of having a small business is that you have the freedom and flexibility to live life the way you want and do business on your terms. And I can't wait to help you.