Love, Tolerate or Dislike: Evaluating Your Work/Life Balance

Lonnie Pacelli is an Accenture/Microsoft veteran with four decades of learnings under his belt. He frequently writes and speaks on leadership, project management, work/life balance, and disability inclusion. Reach him at [email protected] and see more at ProjectManagementAdvisor.com.

  Career Development  

Recently I was having a discussion with a colleague. During the chat he made a comment that really resonated with me:

“I love my career—not just because of what I do, but also what it enables me to do.”

That one sentence seemed so simple, but so impactful. He was saying that his career was fulfilling, provided financially, and afforded him the flexibility to do non-work things that were really important to him. It was about both a great career and the benefits his career brought to the other aspects of his life.

As I ruminated over the concept, it occurred to me that it might be helpful to put a bit of definition around the “enabling me to do” phrase. I’ve written in the past about finding contentment in nine different life areas and thought that to be a reasonable starting point, as follows:

• Career contentment - How content you are in your current and future career potential
• Family contentment - How content you are with your family life
• Health contentment - How content you are in your physical and mental health
• Friendship contentment - How content you are with relationships built and maintained with friends and loved ones
• Financial contentment - How content you are in your current and future financial status
• Leisure contentment - How content you are with quality time spent on leisurely …

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