Nigel Marsh presents his four observations on work-life balance:

Nigel Marsh: How to make work-life balance work

To summarize his four key messages:

#1 Acknowledge your own reality: “the reality of the society that we’re in is there are thousands and thousands of people out there leading lives of quite screaming desperation, where they work long hard hours at jobs they hate to enable them to buy things they don’t need to impress people they don’t like.”

#2 Set your boundaries: “commercial companies are inherently designed to get as much out of you they can get away with. (…) We have to be responsible for setting and enforcing the boundaries that we want in our life.”

#3 Find your middle way: “We need to elongate the time frame upon which we judge the balance in our life, but we need to elongate it without falling into the trap of the “I’ll have a life when I retire, when my kids have left home, when my wife has divorced me, my health is failing, I’ve got no mates or interests left…”

#4 Redefine success: “We need to approach balance in a balanced way. (…) Being more balanced doesn’t mean dramatic upheaval in your life. 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.”