Nigel Marsh quit his job at 40, after years of workaholism, and thought long and hard about what work/life balance means. He came to a few conclusions at TEDx Sidney last year:
"The reality of the society we're in is there are thousands and thousands of people out there, leading lives of quiet screaming desperation, where they work long, hard hours at jobs they hate to buy stuff they don't need to impress people they don't like. It is my contention that going to work on a Friday in jeans and t-shirt isn't really getting to the nub of the issue."
See also:
"It's up to us as individuals to take control and responsibility for the type of lives that we want to live. If you don't design your life, someone else will design it for you and you may just not like their idea of balance. It is particularly important that you never put the quality of your life in the hands of a commercial corporation."
Which is why it was so refreshing this morning to read Erika as she summed up Mule's answer to this issue: "we start booting people at 6."
As Marsh says, improving your quality of life doesn't mean resorting to grandiose, sometimes treacherous measures (daycare is helpful, but mostly gets you to work longer hours). More often than not, leaving the office an hour early is all that is required to have a life.
Common sense: "If enough people do it, we can shift society's definition of success away from the moronically simplistic notion that the person with the most money when he dies wins."
-- From SF.