“So, what do you do?” (By the way, I hate this question on principle, for many reasons.)
“Well, I’ve been writing.  I have a blog about sustainability.”
*crickets*
“I have a website, a blog.  And I write about sustainability.”
*crickets*
“Sustainability, and the intersection between sustainability and personal choice.  Conscious living… personal growth.”
“…”
“I also do some consulting work with green start-up companies and some freelance writing and website design.”
“Oooh…. Well that sounds great!  Good for you.”

Clearly, the word blogger and I have a very long way to go.

But that is starting to change.  I kind of want to push past and call myself a blogger, and to get to the point where I feel like I deserve that label (whatever that means).

Because this December, a bunch of A-list bloggers have blown me away with the messages they are spreading, the examples they set, and their use of social media to direct attention to meaningful causes.  I don’t know if it is inspired by the holidays, or something in the air, but it seems like many bloggers are reaching outside their area of expertise, and are using their blogs and social media networks to affect global change.  And I love it!

I am sure this list could be much longer, but these three bloggers stood out for me, particularly because of the gentle way in which they used social media to leverage their causes.

Leo Babauta

Leo Babauta, the creator of Zen Habits (and the recently launched Mnmlist), is a pretty inspiring guy, even on his worst day.  I look forward to new posts on both his blogs and keep an eye on his Twitter account for humorous and insightful comments and articles.  Still, I’ll admit to squeaking like a fangirl when I read this tweet, one of several he sent about vegetarian and vegan eating:

“Beef production contributes more to climate change than entire transportation sector. /via @noimpactman http://is.gd/5gu7B”

His series of no-meat-tweets made my little green-geek heart sing, and I was thrilled to see him leading by example on one of my pet issues.  (Also, Monday night’s bike twitpic gets two thumbs up!)

But even more than his quiet advocacy for sustainable eating and low-impact life choices, I admire his Blog With Heart Challenge, launched jointly with Arvind Devalia of Make it Happen.  What a great way to engage a community of people who love to be engaged!  (At least, it seems to be that is a common trait among bloggers.)  This is also social media leveraging at its finest, pulling together people from all over the world in order to really make a difference.

Seth Godin

A couple of weeks ago, Seth Godin pre-released 3,000 copies of his new book, Linchpin, to motivated readers.  The catch?  In order to receive a copy, you had to make a donation of at least $30 to the Acumen Fund, an organization that uses what they call “patient capital” to fight poverty in the developing world.  In just 49 hours, this book release promotion raised $108,000.

For marketing purposes, Seth could have used many other means of selecting the recipients of his book.  Frankly, some of them might have resulted in more publicity for him.  But he chose this way – pebble, ripple, wave.

Darren Rowse

On Monday night I heard the happy little Twitter chirp and tabbed over to see this, tweeted by Problogger Darren Rowse:

“RT @BitsofBeauty: If each of @problogger‘s followers donated 35c we’d reach our goal – http://bit.ly/7F36Ai – let’s do it”

I clicked through and read the heart wrenching story of the Champet Girls Dormitory and Library Project, a cause I would probably never have stumbled onto if it weren’t for Darren Rowse.  As I have mentioned before, education of girls and women is absolutely one of the most powerful tools we have to deal with all of the issues that confront our species and our planet.  This project is an example of where just a little bit of social media can make a huge difference in the life of many,  and contribute to a more hopeful future for each and every one of us.

I wish there was a way to track how many donations came in because of Darren’s tweet.  I know that at least one – mine – was because of him.

So thanks, you guys.  Thanks for making me proud to say that I’m a blogger and giving me something to aspire to.  Thank you for leading by example.  And thank you for using who you are and what you do to address issues that affect all of us.

Work-Life Balance Is a Lie

The idea of work-life balance is a lie because it creates an artificial separation between your job and your life.  “Work-life balance” implies that your job is not a part of your life.  How is it that we categorize 40+ hours a week as something other than life?

There are 168 hours in a week.  Theoretically, we all spend 8 hours a day – 56 hours a week – sleeping.  (Does anyone actually sleep 8 hours a day any more?  I try, but usually fail.)  This leaves 112 waking hours.  If you work only 40 hours a week, and many of us work more than that, that is 35% of your waking time that you just counted as “not life.”  A full third of your life that is something else.  And according to the work-life balance principle, that’s not living.  It’s work.

This concept we have that our jobs are not part of our life indicates a dangerous level of compartmentalization.  Not only are we writing off a third of our life, but by separating our jobs from living, we end up with multiple standards for how we spend our time.  If work isn’t life, it becomes okay to be miserable about our jobs.  It’s just a job.  The interactions we have with our coworkers take on different criteria – they’re just coworkers, after all.  Keep it civil and get through the day.  And we often let ourselves feel victimized in the context of our workplace.  Even people who are good at taking control of other areas of their lives often feel like they have less control over their “work lives.”  How many times have you felt like you just go to work and try to get through your day?  Do you really want to be “just getting through” a third of your life?

Work Isn’t Your Job

A job and work are not the same thing.  You may have to work at your job, or you may not.   (Studies have shown that the average office worker does 1.5 hours of work in a day.)  Even if you do work hard at your job, your job is not work.

Calculate Your Balance

I found a little work-life balance calculator that improves upon the two-part work/life division.  It divides your time into six categories: work, sleep, leisure, meals, commute and chores.  I am not saying that the calculator doesn’t have its uses.  When I was living in Los Angeles, I didn’t realize the effect my commute was having on me until it started impacting my social life, energy levels, and my health.  If I had entered it into the calculator, I would have seen that I was spending ten percent of my time commuting!  When I moved to DC, my commute decreased to three percent of my time, and it made a difference.  But even this more complex division ignores the complexities of life, especially with regard to leisure time.

For example, I just started riding horses again.  Three days a week I go to the barn, feed horses, clean water buckets and do barn chores.  Often, this is work – not as in job, but as in good, old fashioned, give you blisters, hard work.  So how do we categorize it on the calculator?  Is it work?  I assume by “work, they mean job, so we’ll say no.  The barn is a half hour away, so that is certainly commuting time, but does it count if it’s not a commute to a job?  Plugged into the calculator, that is four to five percent of my week driving back and forth from the barn – it seems like it should count for something.  And what about chores?  It looks like chores, it feels like chores, but I’m paying for the privilege to do them.  The one thing it would seem to count as is leisure.  But for leisure, it sure is a long commute and an awful lot of hard work! (Also, where is exercise on this calculator? That must count as leisure too.)

How about gardeners, especially vegetable gardeners.  Gardening can be very hard work, physically.  If you grow your own food, it will offset your grocery bill, saving you money that theoretically would come from a job.  Also, it is meal-related – time spent shopping for and preparing them.  Is gardening a chore or a leisure activity?  If you belong to a co-op or sell at a farmers’ market, is it a job?

Life Is Work

The reason it is not easy to make these distinctions is that the separation doesn’t actually exist.  Work-life balance is a myth.  Last time I checked, most things in life take work – hard work.  Going to the office, growing your own food, caring for your kids, keeping up your home, being a good neighbor – all of this is work.  And all of this is life.  “Don’t live to work, work to live.”  We do both, because life is work.  And long before we offices, humans went about the work of living, there was just less paper and fewer middlemen to make it seem like work and life are separate things.

It’s okay that living is work.  But it’s not okay that we’ve been trained to think of work as a separate thing, to be balanced with our real lives, whatever that means.  This separation prevents us from finding true balance, a “life balance,” if you will, with all its subtle intersections.

In order to live balanced, integrated lives, we must change how we think about life.  The hours we spend at our jobs is just as much a part of our lives as the time spent not at our jobs.  And it’s okay that the hours spent not at our jobs often seem like work.  By separating work and life, we discourage ourselves from making the choices that allow us to pursue balance – a full life balance, all 100% of it.