We’ve all heard of work-life balance or work-life integration. Regardless of what you want to call it, one thing seems to be clear. We are spending more time bringing our personal lives to work and our work lives home to our personal lives. At conferences I’m frequently asked what I think of this blurring of work and life. From what I have seen, if you don’t like your job, you’re more likely to have clear-cut boundaries between your work life and your personal life. Once the clock hits 5 or 6pm then you’re out of there and don’t want to see, hear, or think about work for the rest of the night!

But, if you love what you do, those lines become less clear cut. Suddenly you don’t mind working later at night or early in the morning; you find yourself having fun while you work and it becomes harder to actually distinguish what work really is. In other words the more you love what you do the more blurring there is.

However, we are moving towards a world where everyone is going to be more connected more of the time. This means that a bit of work/life blurring is going to inevitably happen. In fact, we are already seeing this as companies deploy various collaboration platforms. Many employees around the world are already having a hard time balancing connectivity with availability, just because you are connected doesn’t mean you are always available.

Ultimately, it will be up to us to manage our work/life balance in an effective way. I explore this in more detail in the latest episode of The Future in 5 live from Madrid, Spain. Leave me a comment and tell me what you think!

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