Work-Life Balance

Last night , my son in law visited me with his girlfriend and we talked about there last travel , the work and what they were planned for next week .Like also in other discussion with other people , they were so worried about the time flying by, to have no time for pleasure, has too much work, so much to do , ......has to work late at night and difficult to have a family time .
In summary:to have a good life, a good work-life balance should be considered otherwise a burn-out was nearby.
When , there were gone I started to think  that the word "Work-life" is a problem:Looking as such work and life are separately and considered as two different closed systems, working undependable from each other.It implies that "work" isn't part of life!!
Work( your professional activities,) and life( your personal activities,:family, hobby) are elements of your life(your living, well-being).
Seeing your life as a system will help you to understand that the 2 subsystems(Work-Life)are connected and interrelated and that everything that happens in one system will influence and change the behavior in the other system.
Finding synergy will create a emergence property of happiness.
So don't act in boxes: don't try to optimize your efforts in work separately or optimizing your personal life.
Doing so you will create reinforcement loops in each sub-system, with after a certain time , a collapse as result:burn-out!

So how can you do this?

1.Think holistically:
 
Don't plan your career , plan your life.Don't manage your money, manage your life.

2. Don't think separate but integrate!!
Don't think personal and professional;bring them together as part of a system--your life
Think about them working together:the personal helping build the professional and vice versa.

This quote of Georges Bateson is a good demonstration of it .

Gregory Bateson A Sacred Unity Harper 1991 ISBN 0-06-250100-3 

A system, after all, is any unit containing feedback structure and therefore competent to process information. There are ecological systems, social systems, and the individual organism plus the environment with which it interacts is itself a system in this technical sense. The circumstance that the family as a unit came to be thought of as a system must lead back inevitably, I believe, to considering the individual as a system.
It follows that the ways of thinking evolved by psychiatrists in order to understand the family as a system. . . .The polarization of opinion then will not be simply between practitioners of individual therapy and practitioners of family therapy but between those who think in terms of systems and those who think in terms of lineal sequences of cause and effect. . . .
The basic rule of system theory is that, if you want to understand some phenomenon or appearance, you must consider that phenomenon within he context of all completed circuits which are relevant to it.