Better at Life: Negotiating Finite Time and Infinite Choices by Chris Mullen, PhD (Amplify Publishing)

magine a pile of balls at your feet, no two alike. Some are rubber and will bounce if you drop them. Some are glass. Now imagine that each one is a role you hold, as a parent, a manager, a sibling, a volunteer, a friend, and that you have been juggling all of them for years without once stopping to check which is which. That image, which Chris Mullen introduces early in Better at Life, names the problem precisely: most of us are not short on discipline. We simply never decided what we could afford to drop.

Mullen’s central argument will sound heretical to anyone raised on the gospel of balance: the model was never going to work. It assumes a fixed equilibrium, a scale you can hold steady, when real life keeps tipping it. A sick parent, an extra shift, a kid who joins a travel team, and the formula is gone. Its remote-era cousin, work-life integration, is no better; it dissolves the boundaries that once ended the workday.

His alternative is work-life negotiation. The premise is that we are already trading time for everything we do, and the only question is whether we make those trades on purpose. Every yes is an implicit no. Time, he argues, is a bank account you can never refill, and most of us spend from it mindlessly.

What keeps the book from being another motivational lecture is Mullen’s insistence on tools over slogans. Each chapter ends with a discovery session: sort your roles into glass and rubber; audit a single week of your hours and compare it with what you say you value; score your productivity skills to find where the biggest margin is hiding. His own examples are refreshingly ordinary. He coached his daughter’s soccer team for ten seasons before admitting the role no longer served the value behind it, which was time with her. He paused a PhD to earn HR certifications when that season of life called for income, and picked the degree back up when the season changed. He knows the drowning feeling firsthand: early in his career he answered work email every night until his wife pointed out what he had stopped seeing.

Two ideas stand out. The first is Mullen’s distinction between satisfaction and comfort. People stay on the hamster wheel, he notes, not because they are happy but because their basic needs are met and change is harder than routine. The second is his reframing of multitasking as task pairing: the brain can run one cognitive task and one motor task at once, which is why a phone call on a walk works and a podcast during a book does not.

Mullen writes the way a good coach talks, plainly and with a joke or two, and he resists the urge to prescribe. He does not tell readers which roles to drop or how many hours to work. He asks them to decide by their own values, then renegotiate when circumstances change, which they will. The good life, as he puts it, is not a mountain but a range of mountains.

For anyone who has felt the scale tipping and wondered why the balance advice never sticks, Better at Life offers a more honest starting point. The problem was never your discipline. It was the model.

Nicole Killian