Forget Work-Life Balance and Focus on Coherence Instead
Why our approach to life and career need not be a zero-sum game
As a society we often talk a lot about work-life balance, but this is the wrong way to look at it. When we talk about a “balance” we immediately jump to a competitive mindset where our work is pitted against our life in a zero-sum game. In this zero-sum framework, any gains in the work half of the balance come at an equal loss on the life side.
While fundamentally I agree that we have a limited amount of time (only 168 hours per week!), I think the dichotomy of work or life that is implied by work-life balance is deeply unhelpful. What I propose instead is the concept of coherence. Coherence adds another dimension which helps to more accurately model the reality of our lives and is a better model for choosing how to live in a meaningful, deep, and satisfying way.
Coherence? What’s that?
I realize that perhaps coherence does not have the same meaning for you as it does for me. In our general cultural understanding of the concept, I think of coherence as similar to the idea of synergy – of the whole being greater than the sum of the individual parts. But, as an electrical (and especially optical) engineer, the concept of coherence is much richer. In optics, the idea of coherence is used to describe the interference of light. I’m stepping out a little bit here to introduce some math, but I hope you’ll indulge me.
This equation is a description of the interference of light from two different sources. The first two terms are the intensities of each source individually. But, in this equation, the last term is the most interesting because it contains information about how the two sources are interacting with one another. This depends on the coherence of the two sources.
In the simplest case, consider two sources of light (let’s say from a laser). If the two sources of light are incoherent, then the difference in the phases of their electrical fields (𝛿, the argument of the cosine in the equation) are random with respect to one another. Thus, the interference term (in orange) averages out to zero and the resultant sum is exactly the same as the sum of the two source intensities.
If however, the sources of light are coherent with respect to each other, then the situation is more interesting. In this case, the last term is, in general, not equal to zero since the phases of the two sources are correlated. Instead, this interference term can either contribute positively or negatively to the overall sum.
Your Work and Life: Likely Coherent. But are they constructively or destructively interfering?
So, how does this map onto our discussion of work and life? We can think about our work and the rest of our life as one of three cases:
Incoherent
Coherent and constructively interfering
Coherent and destructively interfering
If our work and the rest of our lives are incoherent, this means that they are independent and do not influence each other. I think that this is rarely the case, especially in today’s culture of more flexible remote work and a more complete interweaving of our work with the rest of our lives. This is aided by the technological links like our email inboxes that keep us intentionally or unintentionally connected to our work 24/7. Maybe this case applies if your work requires security clearances which strictly prohibit you from taking work home, but this is a relatively small subset of us.
Instead, I think that it is highly probably that your work and life are coherent with each other. In this case, the question is whether they are interfering in a helpful (constructive) or unhelpful (destructive) way. Again, as we discussed above, the last interference term in orange can be either positive or negative while the first two terms are strictly positive. This means that coherence between our work and life increases the stakes. We have the opportunity to reap the benefits of constructive interference or suffer the consequences of destructive interference.
As you go through your week, I hope this framing is helpful as you think about the interaction between your work and the rest of your life. There are areas where I feel strong constructive interference, for example, during the summer where the seasonality of the academic calendar gives me additionally flexibility to spend time with my family which has the additional benefit of infusing more creativity and joy into the hours I spend at work. On the other hand, there are times where I feel the tension of destructive interference – the incessant pull of the never ending list of things to be done, lectures or assignments to be improved, papers or proposals to be written, emails to be sent, etc.
Coherence > Balance
While at the end of the day our time and attention are our most valuable (and limited resource) I think that replacing our vision of work-life balance with one of work-life coherence is a much more realistic and ultimately fulfilling way to look at it. As you go through your work this week, try this on for size and see if you can identify areas where you feel constructive and destructive interference between your work and life. And then check out the book recommendation for this week for some tips on how to find more ways to maximize the constructive interference.
The Book Nook
Designing Your Life has been on my reading list for a long time. I first heard about Bill and Dave’s work on Life Design when I participated in a workshop run by their organization, the Stanford Life Design Lab in the winter of 2020. The workshop was a several-day crash course for educators focused on introducing the concept of life design and creating opportunities to imagine how it might be relevant for our local contexts.
The main goal of the book is to learn how to apply design thinking to your life and is centered around the question of finding your way vocationally. True to form, the book practices what it preaches and is jam packed not only with information, but also with a set of activities to explore finding your way and uncovering how to find a career which brings you joy.
I like almost all of the exercises in the book, but two of my favorite ones are the workview/lifeview and odyssey plans.
In the workview/lifeview exercise you write a short essay describing what you think is the main purpose of your work and another essay describing what you see as the main purpose of your life. Then, you look at the two of them next to each other (ideally in a group of like-minded friends) and search for areas of constructive and destructive interference.
In the odyssey plan exercise you sketch out three potential journeys for the next 5 years of your life. The point of this exercise is to get you thinking outside the box. While you can choose any framing for each of the three plans, the ones I like are: the story you tell everyone now, the pivot, and the constraint-free plan. With these three framings it is interesting to see the way that just adopting a new framework changes your outlook and life goals. And of course, maybe you will find an insight that you want to pursue further.
Regardless of where you are in your professional life: a high school student about to go off to college this fall, a fresh graduate just starting your first job post-college, or someone in the middle or end of your career, I think you’ll find the insights from this book helpful in framing or reframing your career and pursuing greater depth in your life.
The Professor Is In
One of the great things about academic research is that it gives you the opportunity to connect and collaborate with researchers across the world. Recently I’ve had the chance to participate in a few review and roadmap articles that help to give a broad perspective on the state of a field and lay out the directions for future opportunities. The latest of the articles, “Roadmap on Wavefront Shaping and deep imaging in complex media,” was published online earlier this week in JPhys Photonics.
My specific contribution was to Section 6 on guidestar-assisted wavefront shaping which was written along with my colleagues Zhengtao Cheng (Caltech), Roarke Horstmeyer (now at Duke; we did our PhDs in the same group at Caltech), Changhuei Yang (my PhD advisor at Caltech), and Lihong Wang (one of my PhD committee members).
Although you might not be game for all 120 pages of the roadmap, these types of projects provide a great reference point to describe what has been done to date and to sketch out a way forward. A special thanks to Sylvain Gigan and Ori Katz for organizing this project!
Leisure Line
As I’ve mentioned before, Needtobreathe is hands down my favorite band. While a concert recording certainly can’t do justice to the experience of being there in person, I’ve been really enjoying this recording and concert video from their show last October.
Still Life
What’s a trip through Boston without a stop at Mike’s Pastry? I managed to pop by on my way back west after my conference finished up last week and before my flight left from Boston Logan airport. If you’re in Boston, make sure you stop by the North End to get some cannolis (although unfortunately, like everything these days, they’re nearly twice as expensive as when I last was there 4 years ago!). And if Boston is not on your list to visit soon, I just learned today that you can order a kit to make your own cannolis at home!
I thought it was going to say forget work.