Michael Bungay Stanier has just posed the question Should you be working on vacation? on his Great Work blog, as part of a follow-up to an entry on the Brazen Careerist blog: I’ll Be Working On Vacation: What’s Your Idea Of Work/Life Balance?
“Should you …”: My life used to be full of shoulds, each of them generating another chunk of guilty conscience, when I wasn’t able to live up to the Should. Then I stumbled upon Virginia Satir’s wonderful little book Making Contact
. It opened my eyes to how full of Shoulds my life had become and introduced me to the choicemaking game of replacing each Should by a Could and testing out the new question. So, “Could you be working on vacation?” Now I have an element of choice. I can choose to work, or not, without suffering from a guilty conscience.
Where does ‘work’ stop and ‘life’ begin?
When are you ‘on’ and when are you ‘off’?
I talked about the first of these two questions yesterday, so just scroll down a few lines. The second is a great question when looking for life balance. The When is not so important, just as long as there are both off and on phases. ‘On’ can be seductive, it often provides a rush. However, with too much ‘on’ and, over time, the body eventually responds less well to stressful situations. We also need our ebb and flow.