TED Talk Tuesday: Nigel Marsh: How to Make Work-Life Balance Work

I don't know about you, but I've had a long-standing struggle with work-life balance since my very first job.  I tend to be an all or nothing kind of person, and this generally leads to me either working like a crazy person at the expense of my health, my sleep, my relationships and my mental well-being; or completely burning out and completely mentally disengaging with work and frantically trying to catch up with all the things I've neglected.

Which is why I was so drawn to this TED Talk.

Nigel Marsh, the author of Fat, Forty, and Fired and Overworked and Underlaid, was the epitome of the corporate warrior.  He worked too much, ate like crap, drank too much, and didn't spend nearly as much time as he should with his family (sound at all familiar?).  He had a life-changing moment that prompted him to take a year off of work.  During this year and after he returned to the workforce, he studied the paradox of work-life balance.

In his funny TED Talk, he offers realistic suggestions on how to try to genuinely achieve work-life balance.

Some awesome quotes from his talk:

“There are thousands and thousands of people out there leading lives of quiet, 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.”

“All the discussions about flexi-time or dress-down Fridays or paternity leave only serve to mask the core issue, which is that certain job and career choices are fundamentally incompatible with being meaningfully engaged on a day-to-day basis with a young family.”