Work-Life Balance in Islam

Working hard for something we don’t care about is called stress. Working hard for something we love is called passion.

Simon Sinek

In the wake of the 21st Century, one of the most important aspect amongst the youth, pertaining to the intersection of the professional life and personal life, is the concept of work-life balance.

Work-life balance, as defined by the Cambridge Dictionary, refers to the amount of time you spend doing your job vis-à-vis the amount of time you spend focusing on your personal life, including your family and things you enjoy. Contrary to the popular belief, work-life balance is bi-directional, instead of being unidirectional.

However, it is important to note that merely spending time on an activity doesn’t necessarily guarantees the balance between the two aspects. For example, a person might still be mentally occupied with the pending work despite being on a holiday. On the other hand, a person might be thinking about the leisure activities they wish to engage themselves in while still being working on their job.

Unfortunately, maintaining a work-life balance effectively has become a challenge, considering today’s fast paced and hyper competitive work environment. In order to maintain it, let’s explore the work-life balance methodology through the lens of Islam.

1. Allocating Focus Time

The key to ensure a work-life balance lies in what is called focus time. It is not enough to merely allocate time to an activity, it is essential to dedicate quality time to the activity, be it your work, your friends and family, your other leisure activity or your side project.

As stated earlier, if we don’t implement focus time into our day-to-day lives, it is possible, more often that not, that we end up being mentally preoccupied with our work whilst physically being on our time-off, and vice-versa. This pattern not only disrupts our focus, but ends up rendering the entire work-life balance useless.

2. Work-Life Enrichment

Another way to ensure a good work-life balance is to implement what is known as work-life enrichment.

As stated earlier, work-life balance has a bi-directional flow instead of a one-way flow, which means that a good personal life yields an improved professional life, and vice-versa. In the hadith mentioned above, our Prophet ﷺ, by stating them as their rights over us, ensured that we look after our bodies and our spouse with due diligence. A good physical health enhances our productivity at work, and a good relation with our spouse enhances our interpersonal skills, thereby helping us maintain a good relation with our colleagues, customers, etc.

3. Maintain a Good Sleep Cycle

One of the most important and indispensable aspects that intersects our personal and professional life is the maintenance of a good sleep cycle.

The constant work pressure in the corporate world, combined with the consistent sense of urgency to meet the task and deliverable deadlines, has pushed us all to work beyond our designated working hours. In order to compensate for the loss of our leisure time, a trend of sacrificing our sleep in order to gain some “me time” has emerged, known in psychology as revenge bedtime procrastination, where the person ends up spending hours in the night entertaining themselves, thus sacrificing their sleep.

It is essential for us to realize that a healthy sleep itself is a part of work-life balance. Not only does a proper sleeping schedule help us maintain a good momentum, both personally as well as professionally, throughout the day, it is also a necessity to maintain a good physical health.

4. Chasing Realistic Goals

At the end of the day, we all must realize that the rat race we’re all forcing ourselves in, is going to yield very little benefit compared to the efforts we’re putting in.

In Islam, the concept of provision, knowns as rizq, is that it is provided and assigned directly by the decree of God, and no human intervention can disrupt or alter the amount of provision a person is to receive in their lifetime. So we can say that most amount of the provision, which includes our wealth as well, is predetermined for every human being.

However, it has become rampant in today’s day and age for people to be influenced by some entrepreneurs, social media influencers, and even the corporate world, into pushing themselves over their capacity and limit to work hard and discard their work-life balance completely in order to make quick bucks in a lesser time frame. While it is true that a few individuals are able to achieve it, the percentage of such individuals is very less, and most of the people end up burning themselves out in pursuit of such unrealistic goals.

The best way to prevent falling into the trap of this rat-race, is to have realistic, achievable goals for ourselves. We all wish to have a great house, a good vehicle, good food and good clothing for ourselves, however, having an extravagant lifestyle will result in not only depletion of funds, but also in forming an unnecessary social pressure to one-up ourselves over the others. In the long run, the constant pursuit of money will disrupt our work-life balance, resulting in physical and mental exhaustion, and even in some form of physical illness, causing health issues.

In conclusion, we can state that the concept of work-life balance is not only existent in Islam, but also encouraged and enforced via Qur’an and the teachings of Prophet Muhammad ﷺ. Today’s corporate world as well as some social media influencers have discarded the concept of balancing professional and personal lives in order to meet their deliverables and sell their products respectively, however, we as individuals must always maintain our work-life balance and prioritize our family and health over the other aspects of our lives.