All this work-life balance stuff I’ve been listening to lately sounds great. You know, as in “JUST GREAT”. The kind of “JUST GREAT” that you sneer as you think “there is no way that I can do that”. I have a home office, and when I hear about separating work time/space from family time/space I get jealous. Really jealous. My home life has spilled over into my dedicated work space, and my work stuff is scattered throughout the house.

Sure, I’ve gone through phases (like the one I’m in now) where I try to separate the conjoined twins of work and family. I’m trying to move a bunch of household stuff from my office so that I won’t be tempted to work on it while I’m supposed to be working. I’ve moved some of the work stuff to a sectioned-off part of the basement so that it will clearly be removed from the rest of the household. I’ve even tried the turning-off-the-light in my office at 5:00PM to denote the end of a work day and the beginning of family time.

Unfortunately, pretty much every time I do things like that, I slip back into a much more gray morass of work-life IMbalance.

So I was out mowing part of our 14 acres this weekend. I had to wait until the rain was mostly blown and sun-dried from the overly long grass, so I got started much later in the day that I had planned. And it was much hotter. 90+ degrees, to be exact. And because we have the trifecta of poison oak, poison sumac, and poison ivy hiding in various places on our property, I have the pleasure of mowing in a long-sleeve shirt, sweatpants, and long socks. At least I can tell everybody I’m “hot” and mean it. The kids really seem to get a kick out of me asking them if I’m Hot-or-Not. (OK, they don’t really get a kick out of that, but that hasn’t stopped me from asking them pretty much every time I go out to mow, and every time I come back in. Maybe I’m the only one who thinks it’s funny…but I’m not really sure.)

Back to the point. I was mowing and it was hot. I was listening to a Podcast where Pat Flynn of Smart Passive Income was talking about work-life balance. He made it sound so great. He talked about having a tiny one-bedroom apartment when he started out, but he had a little corner designated to his business. When he was working in that corner he was “at work”. When he wasn’t in that corner he was not “at work”. He talked about buying his new house with a bona fide office. He talked about having a door he could close, and kids and a wife who respected that door. He talked about being able to shut off his brain from work stuff and turning it on for family stuff.

And that’s when it hit me. As entrepreneurs, home workers, and whatever other label you might want to put on yourself, this kind of lifestyle isn’t really about “balance”. It’s not about making sure that we invest the same amount of time, energy, and effort into work as we do into our families. It’s not about putting on a blindfold (like Lady Justice) and balancing the scales. In reality, it’s about going 110% after one part and then going 110% after the other. It’s about having your brain churning and switching gears in an instant. It’s about really focusing on one area and then trying to do the same on the other.

But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t guilt. Heck, I worry about not spending enough time with the kids. I worry that I’m not spending enough time on my business. I can’t shut my brain off from one aspect while I’m engaged in the other. I’m working on it. Despite what my family will tell you, I really am trying. But I need to have a little more IMbalance for a while. I need to focus even more completely on one part and then the other.

So for the next 12 weeks I’m going to perform an experiment. First off, I’m going to try to be more cognizant of when I’m “working” and when I’m “not working”. All the various addiction programs talk about recognizing the situation is one of the first steps to improvement, so this seems pretty obvious to me that I have to do this. I’m also going to try and shut my brain off a little bit when I’m with the family. My recent series of Facebook posts about the 10 Daily Habits of Exceptionally Happy People really got me thinking about being more aware of what I’m doing. Those 10 Habits are going to be part of the process over the next 12 weeks. I’m going to focus on one of the habits for an entire week, not just a day, and try to really live up to them.

In my mind’s eye, I have a slightly different (some will say skewed) vision of work-life IMbalance. It’s not where the teeter totter is perched equally above the ground on both sides. Where each of the riders is standing on tip-toe trying to keep the teeter totter from moving. It’s not a perfectly immobile scale that is neither higher nor lower on one side. Nope, my teeter totter or scale is doing what it was designed to do, where one side is down, then up while the other side is moving in the opposite direction. The IMbalance is also Balance in the sense that everything works out in the end. My goal over the next 12 weeks is to see if I can be a bit more in control of the rapidity of the changes in direction. Rather than crashing into the ground on one side while the other person goes flying into the air on the other, I’d like to be able to direct the shift in movement with a bit more control. While I love the feeling of going airborne and flying off the seat, the crash into the ground on the other side hurts like the dickens.

I hope you’ll join me for the ride as I try to figure out this whole work-life IMbalance thing. My plan is to check in every week for the next twelve weeks and assess where I am, what’s worked, what’s failed, and generally try to chronicle the journey that I’m on.

Stay tuned…and make it a great week!