Member-only story

Time To Move On From The Battle Between Productivity and Presence

Tom Barrett
4 min readSep 15, 2021

--

My weekly email helps educators and innovation leaders enhance their practice by sharing provocations, ideas and mental models. Join today, and get your copy this week.

The collision of commitments caused by COVID restrictions highlights our priorities. What we once thought was important dwindles in our estimations.

The structures of life are stressed and challenged, which reveals what we value and what remains true.

Photo by travelnow.or.crylater on Unsplash

I know you grapple with the ‘great struggle’ of our times, the ‘ultimate juggle’ of professional and personal commitments intertwined. Or perhaps it is the equilibrium between productivity and presence, as Maria Popova describes it.

Of course, we are talking about our work/life balance. I endeavour to update my mental models around this concept, and I want to share some progress.

You will be pleased to see we begin on a practical footing. Your first step to updating your mental model for professional and personal commitments is a ‘find a replace’.

Find what: balance

Replace with: cycle

Yes, replace all.

The current understanding of work-life balance is too simplistic. People find it hard to balance work with family…

--

--

Tom Barrett
Tom Barrett

Written by Tom Barrett

Re-discover the curiosity you had when you were 6. Learning, Leadership, Innovation. Join Medium to support my writing https://buff.ly/3RtxqpE << Affiliate link

No responses yet