Fortune

Craving work-life balance is a huge red flag, says Fortune 500 CEO—and like Barack Obama, he happily works through the weekends

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While millennial and Gen Z workers consistently rank work-life balance as their number one priority, Iñaki Ereño, the chief executive of one of the world’s largest healthcare companies, says if you’re obsessing over balance, your problem isn’t the hours. It’s the job. “When the balance of your life becomes a topic, then you have a problem,” Ereño exclusively told Fortune . “You need to like your job, to not feel that your life needs to be balanced.” Essentially, in his eyes, needing to separate work from life with a hard 5 p.m. cut-off doesn’t make sense when you genuinely love what you do. So if you’re constantly counting down the hours to the end of the day, it’s probably a sign that something fundamentally isn’t clicking. Ereño says he loves running the £16.9 billion-a-year ($23 billion) Fortune 500 Europe company with over 100,00 employees so much he thinks about it while at the gym lifting weights with his 23-year-old son . And it doesn’t stop there. “I enjoy thinking about business things on the weekends,” the 61-year-old admitted. “I do emails, and I read my papers and all of that. Do I feel that that is a big pressure? No… I enjoy doing that. So I don’t feel I need to think about how I balance my life.” His advice for anyone who lives for the weekend? “I think the advice here is to take some time to think about what you like doing,” he added. “Don’t do a job that you don’t like, so then you need balance.” In other words, stop chasing work-life balance and instead start asking yourself why you’re craving it—it might be time to change not just your schedule, but your career. The Fortune 500 CEO’s strict daily routine When Ereño’s not running a multi-billion dollar healthcare group, he is, by his own admission, still very much in work mode. Just not in a way that feels punishing to him. He starts most mornings around 6:30 a.m. with a black coffee and six newspapers—three in English, three in Spanish—on his iPad before jumping on the tube (Britain’s subway) to …