This comes after watching a talk show, where a Malaysian celebrity talks about the struggle of young Malaysian, and part of it was about work life balance. In the interview, she gives opinion on work life balance only when she had achieved her goal. She let out a laugh, and added “unless you’re born rich.”

True, if you’re born to a rich family, you have a safety net to fall on to. Employment might not cross your mind. You will start your own business. Or just live off your monthly allowance.

But not all people born to a rich family. And not all rich kids want to live off their family fortune forever. Hence we work. And work can be difficult to some.

I used to always think about work life balance

For many years, I keep asking “do i balance my work and my life?”. Working in finance industry, there are many times that I’d work beyond standard working hours. Apart from finishing work late almost daily, I’d missed my daughter birthday celebration for many years, because she was born on a date coincidentally the same as term end closing date. It’s not that miserable actually. Usually we just postpone the birthday party. Despite us able to adjust that to accommodate my work, I admit, I always felt guilty. She’s never upset, but it wont change the fact that I’m always not there on her birthday.

At work, I try to achieve this work life balance. Go to work early, and finish on the dot. Most of the time, it didn’t work. My job is at the end of the flow, so it all depends on the front team.

Here, my understanding of work life balance is to prioritise the quality time I spent with my family shall not be less than my working hours. From this perspective, I was determined to improve my knowledge and problem solving skill to shorten the process involved in my work. I received praise for modernising the work tools by converting it all to database and digital template. It did save a lot of time.

Then comes COVID

Companies start Working From Home (WFH) as countries announced a lockdown to combat the COVID-19 spread. Fortunately, my project on transforming working tools were already 70% completed. Else, it will be chaotic. Everyone realise that we need to go paperless now.

But there is one problem. When we WFH, we have to deal with trust.

“Can we trust a colleague to do their job?”

“How do I convince my boss that I’m working?”

Home, once a comfort place, now become a work place. People have become insensitive to other’s privacy. You received call after the supposed working hours. “Why not?” they said. “You are at home anyway. Just turn on the laptop, do some work and email me the report”. But it’s already 9 pm. “This customer is important”. You end the night with frustration.

Work is life now

Your workspace is just few steps away. Your home is now exposed to strangers via video conference. I turned off my video feed after someone commented on the colour of my wall. Once, my family member had to listen to me raining F bomb in my phone call because some colleague decided to give unsolicited opinion when I informed one of my family member had contracted COVID-19. I regret that my family have to listen to it. It definitely changed how I view this person. Some people just shit through their mouth. Just another episode of office politics.

But what is more rewarding about working from home is that I spend more time, well.. at home now. I spend more time with my kids. We have time to play board game after dinner. We communicate more face to face. I cant help but to think “how many years I have missed this beautiful interaction?”. The money’s worth it, but this is worth more than anything.

Each one of us will have a different opinion on this subject because our job is different, our motivation to work is different, our relationship with colleague is different, and it goes on. We go through life differently, hence we can’t force our idea of struggle and reward to everyone and expect it to become a standard.

Conclusion

To achieve work life balance, you must be good at your work. It means you must be competent, discipline and have a good support in your working environment. When you have that, your work will be easy to execute, shorten processing time, and still have more time to explore career growth. Be good at your job, so you wont spend more time at work. Be good at your job, so it wont interfere with your mind when you’re at home.

There’s nothing more important about work than having a good mental health and good relationship with family members.

Happy is what define the purpose of work life balance.

Find and define your happiness.