Small things matter

From Nigel Marsh's: How to make work-life balance work (video bellow)

The thorny issues of work-life balance:

• It is quite easy to balance work and life when you don't have any work. Not a very useful skill, especially when the money runs out.
• The first step in solving any problem is acknowledging the reality of the situation you're in. And the reality of the society that we're in is there are thousands and thousands of people out there leading lives of quiet, screaming desperation, where they work long, hard hours at jobs they hate to enable them to buy things they don't need to impress people they don't like.
• We need to face the truth that governments and corporations aren't going to solve this issue for us. It's particularly important that you never put the quality of your life in the hands of a commercial corporation.
• You can't do it all in one day. We need to elongate the time frame upon which we judge the balance in our life, but we need to elongate it without falling into the trap of the "I'll have a life when I retire, when my kids have left home, when my wife has divorced me, my health is failing, I've got no mates or interests left." (Laughter) A day is too short, after I retire is too long. There's got to be a middle way.
• We need to approach balance in a balanced way. Lovely though physical exercise may be, there are other parts to life. There's the intellectual side, there's the emotional side, there's the spiritual side. And to be balanced, I believe we have to attend to all of those areas -- not just do 50 stomach crunches.
• The small things matter. With the smallest investment in the right places, you can radically transform the quality of your relationships and the quality of your life.

Nigel Marsh: How to make work-life balance work