Work-Life Flexibility Is the Start!
Work-life flexibility has become a corporate incentive. Rest assured that when a corporation provides a benefit, the benefit is for the corporation.
Work-Life Flexibility Is the Start, Not the Goal
By Richie Norton
Has a work-life flexibility program ever left you feeling trapped in a time-management trade-off? A time trap looks like freedom but acts like a hamster wheel. Sometimes corporate-flexibility “best practices” create a work culture that holds you captive at home to the job on purpose.
» Have policy and procedure at work ever had a toxic grip on your life at home?» Is your home life at odds with the corporate stopwatch? » If you’re stuck at your desk at home and unable to go watch your child’s third-grade program, for example, how is that more flexible than being stuck at the office? Best practices linger longer than they are welcome. Get relevant. Update and upgrade your life with continuous learning, improvement, and application.
There is an inherent risk in reprioritizing your work-life choices.
The most common work-life trap is swapping one low-priority task for another low-priority task in an endless doom loop of task management versus destination creation.
Is your life doomed to endless task-switching?
A calendar won’t help you with that problem. Neither will the most recent time-management techniques be handed down.
If you’re endlessly changing one goal for another, one habit for another, or one strength for another without achieving your desired results, maybe you’re not paying attention to the larger environment or the larger game being played around you.
Your level of work-life flexibility is not measured by how many hours a week you can work from home. Work-life flexibility is the fusing of three capacities: availability, ability, and autonomy.
You can quickly identify your level of work-life flexibility by asking yourself how seamless it is to create the availability, ability, or autonomy you need to do something. For example, ask yourself these work-life flexibility questions about time, means, and choice:
How available am I, at will, to dive deep into a new project, go on extended vacations, hang out without stress, write a book, stop working etc., etc., etc.? Pick anything you’ve been wanting to do but haven’t yet and ask yourself why.
• What’s your level of availability to make it happen?
• Are you free?
• Do you have the time?
How able (capable) are you to do the thing you want, if you wanted to, right now?
• What’s your level of capacity and mobility to make it happen?
• Are you able?
• Do you have the means?
How much autonomy, choice, free will, or say do you have to make this decision?
• What’s your level of decision-making to make it happen?
• Are you free to do as you please without negatively impacting others?
• Do you have a choice?
Work-life flexibility is more than freedom of time. Work-life flexibility is actively choosing how to spend your time for greater work-life wellness.
Making your professional work support your personal wellness is a choice.
Where flexibility in work and life is found in being available, able, and autonomous, inflexibility in work and life is found in being unavailable, unable, and disempowered.
The next time you say no to something you want to do at work or in life, ask yourself how flexible you’re being. In what ways can you be productive without sacrificing values?
Flexibility isn’t your boss’s gift to give. You must create it yourself—even if you are your own boss.
Every choice you make can make you more available, able, and/or autonomous in one thing and/or less in another. People, places, and timing all come into play . . . and that’s the point.
It’s one thing to be able to do something, another to be available, and another to be allowed to do it at all, and vice versa.
So, how do you get true work-life flexibility?
How do you experience that freeing feeling of mental work-life wellness? The key to unlocking your autonomy and having the flexibility to act on your interests is attention prioritization. Good things happen not by managing time but by prioritizing attention.
Adapted from the book Anti-Time Management by Richie Norton (Published with Permission)
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About the Author
Richie Norton is a career expert and award-winning author with unique insight into occupational burnout. His latest book, “Anti-Time Management: Reclaim Your Time and Revolutionize Your Results with the Power of Time Tipping” is available everywhere books are sold (including Amazon and Barnes & Noble.) For more information, visit www.richienorton.com or follow him on social media. He’s @RichieNortonLive (on Facebook); @Richie_Norton (on Instagram), and @RichieNorton (on Twitter).
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