Is your life all work and no play?

Running your own business often means working long hours at the expense of your home life. JOEL BUDD looks at ways to avoid burn-out

On 1 January, people all over Britain joined in a common pledge: to work less and spend more time with families and friends in 2003. Like many New Year's resolutions, the pledge will be broken. Some people will resist the lure of the office for a few weeks, but others will hold out only until the first crisis hits. Some have doubtless broken their pledge already and are reading this newspaper on the way to work.

Sadly, this is not surprising. Although it would be nice to think that the number of hours a person works is determined by willpower, other considerations are much more important. This year, as every year, men will work longer hours than women (or at least, they will spend more time in the office), managerial staff will work more than junior staff, and business owners will work longer than everyone.

Last month, a Midlands study found that three quarters of entrepreneurs regularly stayed at work until after 7pm. They weren't at all unusual. In the nation as a whole, one in eight small business leaders puts in more than 70 hours a week. Shopkeepers drive themselves hardest: according to Eagle Star's small business division, more than a quarter haven't taken a holiday in four years.

"In a small business there are, by definition, very limited resources, and the owner-manager often does work very long hours," says Alexandra Jones, a researcher for The Work Foundation. And because relationships in such a business are very close, others feel the need to stay in the office and help them. They may also feel it's a good way to get ahead."

But small business leaders who regularly work long, antisocial hours now appear deeply unfashionable. All the talk now is of balancing work and life. Pollsters report that most people would gladly take a pay cut in return for shorter, more flexible hours. Big corporations tout their family-friendly credentials and talk about the importance of time sovereignty. The work-life movement even has a nifty slogan: "juggle not struggle."

If smaller entrepreneurs refuse to hear the work-life gospel, should anything be done to make them listen? Is there anything wrong with their workaholic habits?

Small business owners are not bound to work long hours. They remain at their desks because they think their efforts help to grow the business, or simply because they enjoy it. Francis Green, who studies the topic at Kent University, says that many people take pleasure in working more than 40 hours a week.

"The people who express the lowest levels of job satisfaction are those who work normal hours," says Professor Green. "Higher levels of job satisfaction tend to be recorded by people working 25 hours a week or 60 hours a week. It's a U-shaped relationship."

This may be especially true of entrepreneurs – a self-selecting group defined by their acceptance of risk and their willingness to work hard. For them, the survival and growth of a business tends to be its own reward.

Indeed, some of the most successful entrepreneurs set out to bulldoze the walls separating work from life. In his heyday, Richard Branson made work seem like leisure and turned his leisured pursuits into a tool for marketing his business.

Other business leaders often find work and life mixing on their own accord. Work is interrupted by family crises, which, in many cases, are caused by overwork. Hours of "leisure time" are spent entertaining clients, checking accounts, and fretting over the business. The shopkeepers who responded to Eagle Star's survey said that they spent an average of 15 hours a week worrying.

Alexandra Jones believes that the concept of work-life balance doesn't account for these things. "It's a bit of an illusion," she says. "It's very rare that you can achieve a comfortable balance between work and life. Children don't always get sick after five o'clock in the evening. People pay bills at home; increasingly, they work. So let's be honest."

Jones prefers to talk about integrating work and life rather than balancing them. "The word 'balance' suggests that there's an ideal balance," she says. "It's a value-judgement which isn't relevant to people who work long hours because they love it."

Some business leaders do manage to combine long hours with a measure of domestic happiness. Beating the 24/7, Winston Fletcher's recent book on work-life balance, contains interviews with some of the country's leading workaholics – a pretty contented bunch, to judge from the book. "What I aimed to show is that it is possible to succeed in business and have a pretty good family life," Fletcher explains. "None of the 16 people I interviewed said it was easy, but 14 of them are still on their first marriages."

Fletcher and Jones both believe there is a business case to be made for giving employees more control over their hours. Although it is almost impossible to prove that liberated workers contribute more to company profits, such workers do seem to be happier and more inclined to stay put.

The Government has also been won over by this argument. From April, it will give parents of young and disabled children the right to apply for more flexible hours. The Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) is encouraging businesses to pay more attention to the personal needs of their staff and has been posting case studies of businesses that benefited from doing so on its website.

But aside from the obvious problem with this (if the business advantages of the work-life balance approach are so obvious, why does the DTI need to promote it?), there are practical difficulties involved. As Alexandra Jones points out, small businesses are likely to be much more resistant to official blandishments than large corporations, which have more resources and higher public profiles.

Winston Fletcher takes the long view. He believes that if big companies can be persuaded to take the new ideas seriously, smaller organisations may be forced to follow suit. "What the Government hopes to do is create a climate where, because people can work for big corporations and get their work-life balance in order, smaller companies will have to follow suit or they won't get any employees," he says.

If the work-life revolutionaries get their way, small business leaders may soon find themselves isolated in a land full of balanced, contented workers. These lonely souls might look for kindred spirits in America – the traditional land of the workaholic. But they are likely to be disappointed. That country is now headed by a self-confessed nine-to-fiver, who indulges in holidays of almost European length. Even in the US, the days of the driven may be numbered.