Category Archives: Work Life Balance

“Work is the hot cup of coffee in your lap.”

That’s my saying…what do I mean?

It’s very hard to ignore work. Once you start reading emails, you will be lost to everyone around you. If you spend all your hours at work, your universe will be defined by the office. When you work on the weekends, you get annoyed at interruptions….except that’s when your friends and family get to see you.

If you let it, work will be come the hot cup of coffee: impossible to ignore.

So make sure you focus on leaving the office at a reasonable time. Don’t look at your blackberry constantly. Take vacations. Be present when you need to be. Put down the hot cup of coffee.

Could You Wear the Same Thing Every Day?

I have always said to people that if they issued a uniform at my place of work, I’d be ecstatic.

In the absence of that, I have my own version of wearing a uniform: skirts, crewneck sweaters, twinsets, and a necklace. In colors that mix and match.  I have a uniform for weekends too: dark denim, turtlenecks, a jacket. It’s just easier. If they had Giranimals for adults, I’d sign up. Continue reading →

Busy vs lazy (freedom?)

I am lazy. My parents would point this out to me when I was growing up.  What that really meant I was doing what I wanted to do, not what they wanted me to be doing. In my head, I would be thinking “Can’t I just be left alone?”  I like lazy. I like not having things to do, places to go, people to see. I love empty spots of time, where I can choose what I want to do because I want to do it.  Because being lazy to me, means being able to be a kid again: to not have people scheduling meetings on my calendar (curses to Outlook), asking to do something, see something, say something.

Sometimes I just want to be on my own. Like when you’re a kid, waking up on a Saturday with the whole day ahead of you. Or when you go to college, and realize you can do whatever you want on the weekend, other than study. Or when you’re on a plane, and people can’t reach you so it’s ok to watch 5 movies in a row. Or when a meeting is cancelled, and you realize you just got time back.

Supposedly, the opposite of being busy is being lazy. I would say the opposite of being busy is having freedom.  This article gives great perspective on the perils of being busy.

Life After Work

Thought this was a great article. Erin Callen was one of those women that got a lot of press: she was the CFO of Lehman Brothers. She was smart, beautiful, and had a C level job.  Then 2008 hit. Read her article in the NY Times here.

I love her comment: “Sometimes young women tell me they admire what I’ve done. As they see it, I worked hard for 20 years and can now spend the next 20 focused on other things. But that is not balance. I do not wish that for anyone. Even at the best times in my career, I was never deluded into thinking I had achieved any sort of rational allocation between my life at work and my life outside. ”

It’s easy to think that women in senior positions have it all. But as you can see from her article, she only has it all now.

11. Friends and family spell “love” T-I-M-E. Show up.

I get asked a lot about “work life balance” and how I do it. It’s not easy.

Personally, I don’t believe it exists if you define it as balancing work and life equally all the time. Just from a pure math point of view, if you work 5 days a week, there is no way that there can be balance from a time allotment perspective. Balance implies you have equal weight on both sides. So we feel guilty because we can’t achieve the balance, and we beat ourselves up even though it’s impossible.  And we feel bad because we’re told we can have it all. But what does that mean?

What I do believe is in work life balancing.  Continue reading →

Keeping a personal notebook

I was reading an interesting blog (see here: “12 quiet rituals of enormously successful humans”). Take a read, but one that really resonated with me was:

“9, They keep some kind of personal notebook.”

For years, I have had a personal notebook. (not that I am enormously successful!)  I take it on all trips, I always know where it is. It’s a big “Black n’ Red” bounded notebook, with lined pages. But it’s not a journal. Part of it’s a journal, but I don’t write in my journal every day. So what’s in it? Continue reading →