[2021-04-08] Traditions, habits and boundaries
This morning, I had a lovely conversation with a woman who sought my advice on balancing work and family.
I admitted that I've never been great at work-life balance. And I acknowledged that my thinking has evolved since facing ovarian cancer after more than three decades of working full-time.
I told my friend that a few years ago, someone had said to me that work-life balance is the old term—the new concept is work-life integration. Wonderful, I thought at the time. My failure at work-life balance could be rewritten as success at work-life integration—the continuous blending of work and home life. The problem with that idea is that when we try to do two things at the same time, we don't do either particularly well. And in my case, home life inevitably took a back seat to work when the latter demanded it.
In my conversation with my friend this morning, I shared the story of a couple who were both executives and co-parents of young children. One parent dropped the kids off at daycare in the morning and the other picked up the kids in the evening. I remember hearing the male executive say, "Work can have me early in the day or late in the day, but it can't have me at both ends." This was a surprising declaration for the time, as it was during an era when women were still expected to shoulder more parental responsibilities than men. I admired my male colleague for sharing childcare tasks with his wife, for being clear on his boundaries, and for setting expectations with his bosses.
Over the years, I heard of other executives who established similar boundaries. One senior executive would leave work at 5:00 and be offline until 8:00. This was her family time, and it was sacred. She would not check emails while she traveled home, ate supper with her husband and kids, and put the children to bed. Presumably if something truly urgent arose, her boss could call her.
In keeping with these examples, my advice to my friend this morning was to think about traditions, habits and boundaries. Time that would be dedicated to family, not to home life and work life simultaneously.
This is what I wish I had done in my career. The closest I came to establishing boundaries was during the final months of my working (before cancer sidelined me) when I was spending every day and evening, including weekends, focused on the response to the COVID pandemic. It took a colleague's saying to me, "How about I take Saturdays off and you take Sundays off?" before I finally stopped trying to do everything. Up until that moment, we were both on all the time, as were many of my executives. From that point onward, I would put my out-of-office notice on my email on Sundays, indicating that my colleague was in charge, and I would not take any meetings. The first Sunday I took off, I spent the entire day doing a crossword puzzle; I was emotionally and physically exhausted, and the puzzle kept my mind off work. On subsequent Sundays, I would use part of the day to catch up on work (so wasn't completely off), but I still welcomed the break from calls and relentless responsibilities.
I wish that I had had more traditions when my children were growing up. While I did spend lots of time with my kids, it was more haphazard than planned. And the problem with practices that are unplanned is that they are easily set aside when work comes calling.
So my advice to my friend—who would like to advance in her career without sacrificing quality time with family—is to establish traditions, habits and boundaries now, when she is still early in her career. That could be a 5:00 to 8:00 p.m. sacred time for family or a Saturday morning ritual or a yearly trip to the cottage during summer holidays. It can help to think about what we want our kids to say about our family life when they're older. For example, "I remember that Mom read us a story every night" or "I loved dad's pancakes on Saturday mornings." Dedicated, deliberate and undivided attention is what kids need and what they'll remember when they're older. Work will always demand more and more from us. When efforts to protect family time become part of our daily or weekly routine, we are more likely to stick with them and to garner our boss's respect for them.
