A theme you may have heard in BMI's publications, whether it is the newsletter, social media, or YouTube videos, is stressing the importance of holistic success. Holistic success, a balance between the work life and home life, between personal and professional, between hard work and relaxation, is sort of an abstract concept. At first glance, it might even be interpreted as nothing more than an obvious statement; of course there has to be a balance between work and home. You can't live at the office; Maslow's hierarchy exists, in varying degrees, and applies to everyone. Everyone requires food, sleep, and a day off now and again. Arguments on the amount of any of these basic necessities aside, the major focus of BMI's holistic success is the time component of the work-life balance. Finding the sweet spot of working hard, but not overworking, is not nearly so straight forward as it would appear at the aforementioned first glance.
For sake of simplicity, time, in this example, will only be divided into two categories: working and not working. If you are spending time working - independent of whether you are physically at the proverbial 'office' - that time counts as work. Everything else you do counts as not work. What ratio of time, work to not work, is the secret ratio that maximizes success, without unreasonable sacrifice? There is, you will agree, diminishing returns for the value of putting additional hours into work beyond a certain point. The graph of work hours versus output has some hard limits that dictate this diminishing return. At the upper limit, a 24-hour input of work in a day will suffer catastrophic output. Not taking a single second to sleep, eat, go to the bathroom, or relax is not only impossible, it is detrimental to one's health; you could even go so far as to call it reckless abandon. Clearly the ideal ratio of work to not work, then, is not 24 to 0.
On the other extreme of the graph, the lower limit wherein not a single second is spent working will have a similarly catastrophic output of nothing. A business with sufficient automations will survive some level of zero output by owners and key employees, but that momentum will only last for so long before operations crash to a halt. The ideal ratio of work to not work is not 0 to 24. It might seem like common sense, but it does frame the question of where holistic success can be found, and pose another question altogether. Tim Ferris, in his book "The 4 Hour Work Week," addresses this latter question; the question of why the ratio can't be 0 to 24. Since he does an excellent job of making the case that the ratio should be as close to 0 to 24 as possible, let's examine the build-up to that ideal scenario.
Somewhere in between the extremes lies a golden ratio of time put into work, time spent relaxing and recharging, and the output of time spent doing both. A single newsletter article might not be sufficient to explore finding that ratio, but that is not it's intention. Instead, take the time yourself to reflect on what your current ratio of work to not work is, and if it is in need of adjustment. The business world often gets so wrapped up in doing things 'the way they've always been done' that it doesn't take the time to ask if the status quo is the best approach. A 40-hour work week might be the norm, yet there is nothing to say that it must be. Can you justify the time you spend at the office as being truly productive? Or, is it time spent there out of convention, of habit, without real reason? Taking the time to prove to yourself that the time you are (or aren't) spending working is the closest you can get to your perceived golden ratio will motivate you in the time you are at work, or force you to move closer to that ratio. And, as always, if the ideal ratio is spending less time working, BMI is here to offer the support you need to clear your plate.
- Your BMI family