Making the most of leisure time and work is a delicate balancing act

TODAY is work/life balance day. You may not thank me for bringing it to your attention. Because ‘work/life balance’ is a concept we all feel we should feel warm towards. But the very phrase bores us rigid.

I raised the concept briefly with two of the guys I work with before the weekend. That was the morning one of them had found his dirty shirts in the fridge at home, having been so tired the night before, he'd mistaken it for the washing machine. Which was no bad thing, because there's damn all in his fridge to be offended by incoming manky shirts and anyway, his washing machine leaks into the room below and he'd forgotten to put the bucket in that room to catch the overflow. He's worn out coping with recalcitrant technology that's unfixable because the builders hid every part liable to breakdown behind a slab of marble that weighs more than a 767.

The other colleague has just embarked on a keep-fit campaign, but didn't have the time to properly read the guide to building muscle groups before he got started. So, on his first visit to the gym, he did ten times the correct number of repetitions with each weight. The following morning, he had to ask a co-worker to comb his hair for him because he couldn't lift his arms high enough to reach it.