Work-Life Integration: Do Long Hours Equal Productivity?

It seems to me that many people are short on time and long on things to do. This certainly was an issue of mine also at one time. What I learned during those years was that time wasn’t the issue as much as was energy and focus. Lack of clarity and reflection time often drain the brain.

When we are not clear about where we want to go and why, we waste a lot of our energy. And without passion and clarity, you are not likely to have much productivity. You may certainly have plenty of activity, but these are not the same thing; long hours often don’t equal productivity.

I see this over-activity as a type of addiction. I sometimes hear people say that they “can’t sit still,” that they feel that they “should” be busy. We have worked our way up to a frenzy with ADD-type symptoms in our culture. This is no way to live and work. We would get more done in less time by making time to reflect, rest, and have some fun. One reason why innovation is in short supply is that we are too busy to slow down enough to let our creative juices flow.

A busy mind is not very creative. When we give our left “busy” brain a break and intentionally create space for mindfulness practice by engaging our right brain more, and resting the left, our productivity improves. Breathing deeply and making time to gain clarity about our strategy, projects, and what is purposeful for us will allow us to experience:

#1. More Happinessrn#2. More Passion in our lifern#3. Better Healthrn#4. Higher IQrn#5. Higher EI (Emotional Intelligence)

The next great challenge for humanity is to better understand our self. When we do, we will be able to improve our performance and create lifestyles, products, and services that we haven’t even imagined yet. And until we learn how to build our imagination muscle, we are not likely to expand our vision for our life. It will take intention to turn around the over-activity. Yet with all of the research that is supporting engaging more of the right-brain into our everyday life, there is hope.

Our workplace and our home environment could benefit from purposeful integration of work/life. After all, you take “you” with you wherever you go. We need to develop a new mindset to achieve this – a mindset for success instead of for stress.