Increase Productivity by Not Hating Your Job

In September 2001, Tevis Gale sat down with her boss at lunch near their AOL office in New Brunswick, N.J., and told him he had to fire her.

After 13 years of striving to climb the corporate ladder, Gale says she had started to notice two things going on around her. First, there were people overengaging in their work to the point of burnout, which Gale admits she was doing. Second, there were workers who had a hard time engaging at all.

"It struck me that we spend more than half of our waking moments at work, not to mention all the ways in which work affects us in our social lives and our family lives," Gale recalls. "I began thinking that something was amiss. I wasn't sure exactly how to tackle it, but I knew that the question of work-life balance had something to do with it."

One year after her meeting with her boss, Gale founded Balance Integration, a company that teaches the art of work-life balance.

The burning question Gale says she's still addressing: Why is it that work becomes oppositional to life? Why is it that so many people hate their jobs?

The Danger of Disengagement

It seems that from a young age, people are taught to find an acceptable job that will provide a significant salary, and that that will be their main source of satisfaction in life, the 38-year-old entrepreneur says. "But I started to realize that even in corporate America, making six-figure salaries with health insurance and benefits, a lot of us are wandering around feeling unsatisfied and disengaged."

Research has now caught up to what people have known for a long time, Gale says, which is "if you are engaged in your work, you are going to do a better job."