Work-Life Balance is Bullshit: Why Strategic Imbalance Actually Works
Because juggling chainsaws while riding a unicycle isn't a sustainable life strategy
Let's be brutally honest: work-life balance is a unicorn everyone claims to have spotted but no one can actually capture. Especially as a founder with children.
When a journalist recently asked me about my "secret to maintaining perfect balance," I nearly choked on my third coffee of the morning—the one I was drinking while simultaneously replying to Slack messages, reviewing quarterly projections, and mentally planning my son's birthday party.
The Reality No One Wants to Acknowledge
Here's what's actually happening when you see a "perfectly balanced" entrepreneur mom on Instagram:
That stunningly perfect home office: Photographed during the 17-minute window between the cleaner leaving and chaos resuming.
Those meal-prepped lunches: Outsourced, or assembled during a 2am insomnia episode fuelled by pre-pitch anxiety.
That quality family time: Always punctuated by surreptitious email checking and mental task-listing.
Balance implies equal weight on both sides. But entrepreneurship doesn't respect the scales. Neither does parenthood. Both are all-consuming vortexes that demand everything you've got—and then ask for more.
What Works Instead: Strategic Imbalance
After eleven years running my company while raising two children, I've abandoned the balance myth for something more honest: strategic imbalance.
Some weeks, I'm a CEO who happens to have children. Other weeks, I'm a mother who happens to run a company. The pendulum swings—sometimes wildly—and I've learned to swing with it rather than fight it.
When my company was closing its Series C, my children watched more television in two weeks than they had in the previous six months. When my childcare lets me down, my senior team steps up while I juggle calls with Lego construction and snack negotiations.
The secret isn't achieving balance. It's building systems that can handle imbalance:
A business that doesn't collapse when you're not omnipresent
A childcare arrangement with redundancies built in
A partnership (if you have one) based on tag-teaming rather than fairness
The ability to forgive yourself for dropping balls—because you will drop them
The Freedom of Abandoning Perfect
The most liberating day of my entrepreneurial journey wasn't when we hit our first million in revenue, or our first 10 million, or even our first million per month. It was the day I stopped trying to be on top of everything.
I stopped trying to be a perfect mother and perfect CEO on the same day, in the same hour. Instead, I aim to be a good-enough mother and good-enough CEO across the span of weeks and months.
Some days, good-enough means missing the swimming gala but being fully present at bedtime for my son's stream-of-consciousness recap of year 4 classroom politics. Other days, it means missing bedtime but closing a deal that secures my team's jobs for another year.
The Question That Actually Matters
Stop asking yourself: "Am I balancing everything perfectly today?"
Start asking: "Across the tapestry of this month or this year, am I weaving a life that honours what matters most to me?"
The daily threads might be messy, tangled, or snapped. But the overall pattern can still be beautiful.
And unlike those perfectly balanced Instagram CEOs—who I suspect are either lying or have cloned themselves—your messy, honest tapestry will actually inspire other women to build companies without hiding the struggle.
Because the world doesn't need more mythology around female entrepreneurship. It needs more truth.
What's your experience with the balance myth? Have you found systems that work for handling the inevitable imbalance? Share in the comments—I read and respond to each one.