Everyone needs balance. Without balance in our lives and workplaces, we miss much of the joy, beauty, and grandeur of life. If most of your days and nights are focused on doing, striving, and achieving, and your so-called free time is spent in fiercely competitive play or struggling for perfection in yourself or your relationships, you may have very little time and energy left to appreciate your accomplishments or leave any room for spontaneity, serendipity, or simply being, which is as crucial to human life as air, water, and laughter.

Unfortunately, it may take awhile for most businesses to catch on. A 2003 article in the Harvard Business Review defines people who highly value work/life balance as “B players,” or second-tier workers. Declaring an interest in a humanely scaled job could, in some organizations, spell the demise of your career. Victorian writer John Ruskin listed three things that people need in order to be happy in their work. Besides being fit for it and deriving a sense of success from it, he said you “must not do too much of it.” It's up to you to determine what “too much” of it is. As Xerox CEO Anne Mulcahy once said, “Businesses need to be 24/7. Individuals don't.”