No one likes to bear bad news. When a teammate asked recently about how to approach work-life balance, I dreaded the conversation.

Because work-life balance doesn’t exist.

In reality, you can’t separate work and life on the ends of a teeter-totter and expect them to balance. Sometimes work will and should take the predominance of a person’s time and energy and sometimes life should and will require the largest focus. How they weigh depend on a constellation of factors surrounding goals, events, and perspectives.

Further, I’d argue it overly simplistic to categorize existence into “work” and “life” buckets. In light of your goals and priorities, the way you spend your limited budget of time and energy should accord with what matters to you in the short and long term.

In discussing this with my teammate, I had a couple recent examples:

• On impulse, a continuing-education course on a historical era sounded fun. I’d gotten as far as bookmarking it for registration, but I chose to pass shortly before enrollment opened.

• For the last two years, I’ve passed on captaining—or even participating on—a team for a long-distance, long-weekend relay race.

Neither activity fit into my current schedule, which I align with achieving goals that include short-term incremental milestones along a larger picture path.

And lest you accuse me of giving up all fun for obligations, don’t forget: Goals and priorities shouldn’t include only professional life facets. You should incorporate other aspects of your life as well: Family, health, friends, and beyond.

Passing on enjoyable activities doesn’t feel all that bad when I make the decision with bigger and more exciting objectives in mind. Instead of ruing the loss of something that sounded fun, I focus on the fantastic activities underway and ahead. My “busy” takes me in the right direction—one I don’t constrain just to work.

I make smart decisions based on where I want to go in life—work, life, and other—rather than flying by the seat of my pants and hoping I land somewhere good. I live my life with intention, rather than by accident.

And that means work-life balance doesn’t make sense.

How do you assess work-life balance? Or do you?