Work-Life Balance?

Balance is the wrong goal. Instead, embrace imbalance by mutual consent and strive to keep your commitments.

One of my biggest challenges is to meet the demands of multiple responsibilities: family, job, community, personal well-being, etc. Working from home due to COVID-19 has heightened this challenge because work-life boundaries seem blurred. If you struggle with this classic work-life balance issue, I’d like to share a few principles that have helped me be productive and avoid the feelings of guilt that come from a sense of needing to do it all at once.

Balance is the wrong goal

For a long time, I thought of work-life balance as needing to provide equal attention to all things at all times. Framing the issue that way led me to a checklist approach to planning, in which I defined success by the number of items I checked off from my to do list. This led to a constant state of guilt, because it was impossible to get everything done and I constantly felt like I was let someone down (e.g. a family member, boss, co-worker, or exercise partner).

Let me share an experience that helped me realize that balance is the wrong goal.

About fifteen years ago, I was on a bus on my way to an orientation meeting during the first week of my PhD program. Because I had a wife and son, I was stressed about the grueling, time consuming nature of a doctoral program. I had noticed that many of my peers spent 12 to 16 hours on campus, studying and doing research. There was no way I could keep those hours and be with my family, but how would I be able to put in the time necessary to learn what I had to? As these thoughts were swimming in my head, a deceptively simple thought crystallized in my mind: “Listen to your wife. She’ll be the best judge of whether you’re overdoing it.” 

At that moment, I understood something that changed my life: it’s more important to (1) agree with the important people in my life on how I use my time and (2) keep my commitments to those people than to be perfectly balanced. I call this “imbalance by mutual consent.”

Imbalance by Mutual Consent

My wife and I both understood that my getting a PhD was an important, mutually-agreed upon goal that would benefit our family in the long run. We knew that it would require sacrifices for a few years. We tried to communicate as openly as possible about what was important to each of us, what was non-negotiable (e.g. me being home for dinner and bedtime, her and I going on a weekly date), and then we budgeted our time accordingly. Our graduate school time budget wasn’t balanced at all, but it was collectively fair for our family because it met our joint needs and was entered into by mutual consent.

I also learned that it was crucial to strike similar agreements with all the important stakeholders in the various dimensions of my life -- my professors, classmates, friends, and others. For example, my classmates knew that I wouldn’t do study sessions during certain times set apart for my family, and my family knew that other times were dedicated to my classmates. These multilateral agreements helped set clear limits to decide when it was time to move on from one thing to the next.

For imbalance by mutual consent to work, dynamic adjustments, honesty, and fairness are essential. Your needs and priorities, and those of the various people in your life, will naturally change over time. Honest communication (rooted in trust) allows for everyone to express what they really need and what they can realistically sacrifice. Deciding what you will not do is often more important than what you will do. And fairness prevents win-lose bargains in which one party is always the one giving up important things for the other. 

Treat your commitments as sacred

Once you reach a mutual agreement with the important people in your life, it’s crucial to keep your commitments. For example, during the graduate school years my wife and I agreed that it was important for me to be home for dinner and bedtime so I could spend time with our son and her. That was frequently a hard commitment to keep. Often the time to head home for dinner would come around and I still had a lot of reading, writing, or data analysis to do. I wanted nothing more than to have just one more hour to work. But the commitment I’d made to my family was more important, and it was the right thing to do.

Setting strict boundaries had several knock-on benefits. I realized that things take about as long to do as I decide they will take. I learned to focus my attention and effort to get things done within the budgeted time for various tasks. And I discovered something unexpected: imbalance by mutual consent helped reduce the constant self-doubt about whether I was doing the right thing, and the guilt about not being there for the important people in my life. This allowed my mind to be free of disturbances so I could focus on the task at hand and get it done more efficiently.

It’s a constant struggle

While I’ve found the principles of imbalance by mutual consent and keeping my commitments to be more helpful than the simplistic notion of work-life balance, I don’t want to give the impression that my life is perfect or free of conflict in trying to keep up with an ever-growing list of responsibilities. Often I think I’ve struck the right imbalance by mutual consent, only to discover that I haven’t been fair to others. And as much as I try to keep my commitments, I frequently let important people down. I’m grateful for the goodwill and forgiveness of those people. And I’ve learned to forgive myself and be OK with constantly struggling as long as I’m struggling.

I hope you find these principles useful. I’d love to hear about what has helped you find peace of mind as you strive to meet your multiple responsibilities.