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Take the long view on work-life balance
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Sarah Palin’s attempt to remain the all-American Hockey Mom while spending two months riding the presidential campaign bus—and perhaps four years on Capital Hill—has a lot of people talking about work-life balance with more intensity than usual. People are asking themselves, what is work-life balance? Who has it? And most of all, how can I get it?
I think that one reason more people don’t have it—or don’t think they do—is that there is too much wishful thinking about what balance should look like.
Many people believe that proper work-life balance involves getting to work at 9, leaving at 5, and having all of the uninterrupted time they need in the early evenings and weekends for kids and hobbies and exercise and errands. If they’re perpetually tired or heavily scheduled they must be doing something wrong.
But for most of us work long ago ceased to be as structured or contained as it once was. There is never plenty of time. But that doesn’t mean you can’t get around to most things you want and need to do. It just means taking a different point of view of what balance looks like.
In a world where you can shop online from work, take teleconferences from home and read your email from anywhere, balance is fluid, not a static situation that you can establish once and for all. Keeping in balance requires flexibility, a long-term view, and the ability to tweak your work-family-you equation as situations change.
I know someone who trains for triathlons by getting up early to bike to work, swimming at lunchtime and jogging at night, even if it means doing so after a business dinner.
I know someone else who cut back on family time while she completed her masters—she relied on babysitters while she went to class and her husband took the kids out on the weekends while she studied for finals— and launched a second career as a teacher. After her first year teaching, she took a long vacation and drove cross-country with her kids as a reward for their support.
I doubt either of these folks are well-rested, but in their own way they’ve made time for the things that make their lives more full and well-rounded.
That’s close enough to balance for me.
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