8 Best Articles on Work Life Balance

It’s toxic and wrecks productivity.

«More than four-fifths of employees send work emails on weekends. Nearly six in 10 do so while on vacation, and more than half check email after 11 PM.»

Imagine that work had taken over the world. It would be the centre around which the rest of life turned. Then all else would come to be subservient to work. Then slowly, almost imperceptibly, anything…

«The total worker, in brief, is a figure of ceaseless, tensed, busied activity: a figure, whose main affliction is a deep existential restlessness fixated on producing the useful.»

While organizations wage wars for talent, it seems talent is at war with itself.

Overwork has become a credential of prosperity. And yet the perplexing thing about the cult of overwork is that, as we’ve known for a while, long hours …

For the college-educated elite, work has morphed into a religious identity—promising identity, transcendence, and community, but failing to deliver.

«Long hours don’t make anybody more productive or creative; they make people stressed, tired and bitter.»

Work means different things to different people: an economic necessity, a source of self-fulfillment, a status symbol or all of the above. Yet up until recently, few Westerners have questioned the value or necessity of work itself. This is now changing, as Andy Beckett explains in his article for The Guardian. He gives voice to a growing number of intellectuals and political activists who think that our work-centric society is becoming obsolete. In outlining some main lines of thinking within the emerging post-work movement, Beckett provides much food for thought for anybody interested in the future of work.

«On 1 May 1979, one of the greatest champions of the modern work culture, Margaret Thatcher, made her final campaign speech before being elected prime minister. She reflected on the nature of change in politics and society. “The heresies of one period,” she said, always become “the orthodoxies of the next”.»

A conversation with Rotman professor emeritus Roger Martin on why leaders should stop treating companies like machines.

«At the high end, the best hotel, luxury hotel chain in the world.  Issy Sharp, the founder, says he’s got a golden rule.  The golden rule for him is, unless we treat our workers, our employees, our associates like we want them to treat our guests, our guests won’t get treated that way.»

It’s time to stop fooling ourselves, says a woman who left a position of power: the women who have managed to be both mothers and top professionals are superhuman, rich, or self-employed. If we truly believe in equal opportunity for all women, here’s what has to change.