Work Life or Life Work
I heard an interview with Jason Russell one of the founders of Invisible Children, who you may remember started a campaign against Joseph Kony in 2012, hoping to end the evil reign of the LRA. The campaign was an overnight success. However the success happened so quickly that Jason had a very embarrassing and very public break down. In his interview, I was struck by his ownership and honesty in describing his break down and most notably, the role that his family played in helping him get back to work in a healthy fashion. As a family, they established some ground rules to establish a balance between work and home life.
It can be incredibly difficult to find this balance. Complicating the issues is the variety of opinions out there. Numerous books and podcasts have been presented with simple and easy solutions. The problem is that while they all may be simple and easy to implement, they are all completely different. Each family and each job create combinations that cannot be accounted for by a simple three point presentation.
For my family, especially when our kids were little, it was much easier to be at work than it was to be at home with a colicky baby. However it was much more important for my wife to have me come home and provide some relief than it was for me to “get more work done”. We had a number of impassioned arguments that involved my work day and finally, I came to realize that I needed to be home when I said I was going to be home. Not because I was incredibly helpful, but because she was counting on me to provide her with a measure of support. So for our family, we didn’t have a hard and fast time each night that I committed to being home, rather, we had an agreement that I would be home when I said I would be home, and… if there was a change, I would communicate that change.
This worked great. As I could subtly text her that “I was stuck in a meeting with Bob again…” and then she could be frustrated at Bob and not a me.
As our kids got older, this changed from being home to support my wife to being home to support my wife and spend some time with my boys. This began as a challenge when our kids went to bed early, like 6:30 each night early. If I stayed at work late and didn’t get home until 7:00, I would not see them until the next morning at 6:00am when they woke up. It was at this point that our work, family balance switched to accommodate these changes. I began to go into work earlier, and get off from work earlier so that I could spend time with my boys before they went to bed.
It was one thing to come home at 5:00pm each night, it was another thing to come home and engage everyone at 5:00pm each night. This meant putting the phone on the counter and being purposeful in engagement, recognizing that quality time only happens within a quantity of time.
Each family and work situation create a unique combination. The key is identifying which elements are critical to providing a healthy life work balance.
For the Russell family, they laid out some simple ground rules:
- Don’t travel more than 5 days a month
- Spend 1 work day a month with his kids
- Be home at 6pm each night (when in town), no matter what!
For our family, at our current stage of life, our ground rules are:
- Communicate expectations
- Communicate changes
- Share schedules
- Have dinner together
We have found our key to reducing frustration and confusion is clear communication, which establishes clear expectations. Typically, I am the one that fails to add something to the calendar, or has a last minute schedule change. However if we can get it right 90% of the time, it is much easier to provide grace for that last 10%.
Regardless of the ground rules, the notion of segmenting our lives into work life and home life creates silos that begin to pull resources from each other. Sadly the home life resources are usually the ones that suffer the most. If we are able to recognize that work life and home life are interdependent and necessitate shared resources then we will be able to make life really work.