As Australia introduces new rights for employees to disconnect, BMF’s Executive Planning Director, Anna Bollinger, explores why striving for perfect balance can be more draining than liberating, and how leaning into disorder has helped her thrive.
Work-life balance—it’s sold to us as the ultimate key to happiness.
The goal is to become some sort of suburban Goldilocks, achieving a sense of evenness to our days. A bit of this, a little of that, nothing too much, and ideally, a nice nap to top it off.
But while Australia has just introduced a new law giving employees the “right to disconnect”, why does attaining balance still feel so draining and out of reach?
There was a time I pretended that flipping it in the positive and labelling it life-work balance would more effortlessly keep my priorities in check.
Then work-life balance became about work-life blend. For a brief moment returning to work after my firstborn, I convinced myself that if work was life (the bit of life that was just for me), then finding balance might not be such a futile pursuit.
In my quest for balance, I’ve tried it all. Full-time with flexi-hours, three days part-time once the twins arrived, back to four after baby number four and eventually, a hybrid WFH nine-day fortnight—juggling it all while trying to survive endless Cocomelon marathons.
No matter how many hours/days I worked, I was always racing the clock—whether it was breakfast, commuting, creative meetings, or making it home for bath and story time. All in an effort to make the impossible feel doable. But far from doable, I felt perpetually deranged.
Maybe our obsession with finding balance is the reason we’re so unbalanced?
Recent research warns that we’re experiencing ‘wellbeing burnout’. The more pressure we feel to be holistically healthy and balanced is causing us to fixate on what’s lacking in our lives.
The fear of failure is a strong motivator, and there's no denying the importance of finding some work-life balance—because when we're off-kilter, things tend to unravel. Relationships. Mental health. Missed emails. Running out of loo-paper.
But could it be that one person’s idea of ‘balance’ is just another’s acceptance of a little chaos? After all, it's a simple rule of the universe—thermodynamics specifically—that everything naturally drifts toward disorder. It’s like how a clean room gets messy on its own. It takes effort to keep it tidy!
Perhaps real balance is simply staying grounded while everything around you is constantly unravelling. And in practice, togetherness is the new balance.
Through experimentation with work-life balance, I learnt that I could quickly exhaust myself trying to achieve unbreakable harmony in my days. Life isn’t even or balanced, and by trying to force it, I was setting myself up for failure.
It might be time to abandon the idea that chasing work-life balance is actually worth it. Because all considered, balance is frankly, boring.
It's true, life became so much more enjoyable once I accepted that with four kids and a full-time career, days are chaotic, unpredictable, and consequential. And they’re meant to be. It’s how the universe wills it. There is more peace to be found going with the flow, than fighting it.
If that meant regularly shifting from one foot to the other then it was time to accept that as my order (or chaos), defy the old adage of ‘work to live or live to work’ and embrace a full tilt approach to deep-work and deep-life. Rather than balance within each day, my partner and I aim for alternating chaos across the week. Simply put, this means deep days at work and events for 2-3 days a week, followed by deep days with the family the other 3-4 days. It’s one or the other, not everything all the time. I'm lucky to have found a home at BMF, that supports my ordered-disorder and lets me turn the wild ride of parenthood into my power.
The art of living off-balance, and of creating calm in my chaos has come from two key shifts- one in my thoughts and the other in my actions.
When it comes to thoughts - go full-tilt on being present wherever you are.
We often dwell on the past or worry about tomorrow, but by training our minds to stay in the moment, we can find calm even in life’s most chaotic moments. And for a BMF-inspired hack: if your mind won’t come to you, go where your mind is.
When it comes to actions - go full tilt on your boundaries.
Saying 'yes' to one thing means saying hard 'no' to another. Focus on what truly matters and make it your priority. Life will always pull you in different directions, so let your energy flow where it’s needed, without worrying about whether it’s perfectly balanced.
We can try to order things exactly the way we want them to be, but something, somewhere, will always slide out of place soon thereafter. So if chasing balance is going to throw you off course, then make it a point to live in chaos.
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