Let’s Chat: Harmony not balance

By Linda Tooth on April 30, 2025.

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Work-life balance. How many times have we heard this term and believed it to be true?

Many books have been written on the importance of work-life balance and what we need to do to achieve it. I do not believe there is a balance between our work life and our personal life.

Instead, I believe we need to achieve harmony in order to make it work. I first heard the term work-life harmony from Dr. Rebecca Maher, a social worker in the U.S. She was a guest on a podcast I co-hosted, and our topic was three good things and how we could incorporate those into our lives to help us deal with self-care and burnout.

We were talking about work-life balance, and she promptly corrected us by saying work-life balance does not exist, but harmony does. I thought this woman was on to something as there is no balance in our lives.

I am going to use the Oxford Language Dictionary to define balance and here it is, “a condition to which different elements are equal or in the correct proportions.”

Now we know there are only 24 hours to each day. Of those 24 hours we are working at least 8 hours, if not more, depending on the job(s) we have. Some in the helping professions work 12 hours or more in each shift. Some people like me are working two part-time jobs to make ends meet.

With the remaining time we have to prepare meals, eat, do laundry, yard work, take children to activities, find time for ourselves, be there for our partners, and the list goes on. Then we are told we need at least eight hours of sleep each night in order to be healthy. How is all this balanced?

Somewhere along the road we travel every day, we will encounter work-family conflict. How can we not? How can we make time for everything we need to do in life? We know that in many households today both parents have to work.

In single parent homes there is no choice but to work. Statistics Canada tells us that the number of women working today is up 2.7 % to 9.6 million as of September 2023.

How can we achieve harmony when the potential is there for people to be working at least eight hours within a day and there will be conflict? The article Legislative Updates and Cross-National Comparisons of Work-Life Balance in the EU made this point “Work-life balance refers to achieving a state where work and personal life coexist harmoniously.”

We have to come up with a plan so that those two worlds (work life and personal life) can exist harmoniously. I think the first step towards achieving that harmony is to reframe the concept of work-life balance to work-life harmony.

The Oxford Language Dictionary defines harmony as “the quality of forming a pleasing and consistent whole.” That is what we need to do!