Work-Life Balance: The Tactics

Celeste Headlee, Do Nothing: “Set aside a chunk of time every day to do nothing productive. Take a walk without a destination and without worrying about the number of steps you’ll take. Go outside. Group walks in nature lower stress and decrease symptoms of depression, so walk through a park.”

Eve Rodsky, Fair Play: “Only when you demand the time from your partner, your family, and yourself will you have the ability to enjoy what I call Unicorn Space. And like the mythical equine that inspired the name, Unicorn Space is rare, magical, and essential in order for you to reclaim the interests that make you uniquely you, driving you to be the best version of yourself, and for you to be happy as an individual and in your partnership.”

In The Power of Fun, Catherine Price defines “true fun” as “the feeling of being fully present and engaged, free from self-criticism and judgment. It is the thrill of losing ourselves in what we’re doing and not caring about the outcome.”We know we are having true fun when we laugh, feel like we’ve stepped out of normal life, and feel totally ourselves.

True fun is so important because it is an antidote to our life of responsibility as parents. “In the proper doses, irresponsibility and indulgence (and pushing ourselves out of our comfort zones) are very good for us. In fact, they’re absolutely essential to our well-being. Having too many responsibilities makes us feel heavy and burdened. Always prioritizing other people’s needs over our own leads to resentment and burnout.”

At a basic level, of course, we get the concept—that’s why there’s a “weekend.” However, when we fill the weekend days with appointments, tasks, and things we’d describe as “I have to...”, the days feel awfully like weekdays. As Katrina Onstad writes in The Weekend Effect, “After hundreds of years of debate, bloodshed, and dogma, a weekend should be an enshrined right—yet that isn’t exactly what happened. It took a century to win the weekend. It’s taken only a few decades to undo it.”

Kim John Payne and Lisa Ross, Simplicity Parenting: “Moments of Sabbath are “distraction-free zones.” Not many families can set aside a whole day of the week for quiet family time, but we can still carve out some moments. Doing so adds balance to busy days and establishes boundaries.”

Simone Stolzoff, The Good Enough Job: “One of the benefits of, say, going to church or a yoga class is that it’s impossible to work while you’re there. Although many of us intend to work less, work seeps back in unless we actively protect time away from it.”

In the parent survey, one couple reported structuring their weekend mornings to ensure they could catch up on sleep. “[We take] turns sleeping in on weekend days and alternating when possible who wakes up with our son so that at least one of us can catch up on sleep.”

In my house, the “gift” we give each other on Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, and our birthdays is a full day off from childcare.

Of course, actually taking our vacation is a step toward better balance. However, some people don’t get to their vacations because they are looking for a “good” time to do so. But if you wait for a good time to take a vacation, you will wait forever. The goal is to avoid burnout and allocate your breaks well before you need them.

If you have kids, you know that traveling with the kids is a “trip,” not a “vacation.” One solution to finding breaks is proactively scheduling days off when your spouse is working, the kids are in school, and you have your regular childcare available. 

You and your spouse can jointly adopt beneficial tactics, such as making your bedroom darker and cooler, avoiding electronic device use in the bedroom, maintaining a standard bedtime, and avoiding alcohol in the evening.

The upside is that if you have a device-free bedroom and are both in bed at the same time, it can lead to more connection and, well, other types of fun.

Arianna Huffington, Thrive: “Cindi utilized Dr. [Michael] Breus’s suggestion to set an alarm to go off—in your bedroom—when it’s time to go to bed. “You’ll be forced to enter your bedroom to turn the damn thing off—which at least gets you into the right room at the right time,” she told me.”

Joshua Becker, The Minimalist Home: “A decluttered bedroom is less distracting and more calming, promoting more and better sleep. And a person who wakes up rested is in a better mood and has more energy and concentration to devote to making the most of the day.”

Tony Schwartz, The Way We’re Working Isn't Working: “Because feeling relaxed is so critical to sleep, it can also be helpful to intentionally “park” your anxieties before you turn out the lights. This simple technique involves writing down what you’re worrying about in a notebook or on a piece of paper.”

Robert Waldinger and Marc Schulz, The Good Life: “A number of the participants in the study, particularly the men, talked about how they usually leave the stress of work at the workplace. But the study showed that even if we think we leave work at work, our emotions carry over in ways that we may not always recognize. A curt reply to an innocent question, zoning out in front of the TV or computer, a conversation about someone else’s problems that is shorter than it should be—we might be surprised how much our emotions from work can color our life at home.”

One survey respondent mentioned that their family created a rule to honor their commitment to presence while at home. “I focus on work at work and focus on home at home. We have a fairly strict rule—no work from the time you get home until after winding down after the kids go to bed.“

Because many of us work from home at least part of the time, it can be useful to create rules on how to use different spaces in our homes. As Donna McGeorge writes in a chapter of the Harvard Business Review book Boundaries, Priorities, and Finding Work-Life Balance: “Become intentional about how you use different spaces within your home. When we work from the same space every day, our brain forms an association and develops specific cues that allow us to focus and become more productive. The consistency makes it easier for us to separate our work from the rest of our home.”

In business school, I took a class on Work & Family in which we heard from several executives and couples about how they sought the right alignment between their personal and professional lives. One couple shared that they hold a recurring business lunch. The primary goal was to tackle matters like calendars, childcare coverage, logistics, and finances. However, the wider insight was that holding the meeting during the workday meant that administrative tasks did not take over their evening family time. 

Schedule a one-hour sprint to batch process as many administrative tasks as possible. Do this weekly or bi-weekly. The goal of the practice is to enable you to keep all of the administrative tasks in your personal life moving but without having to spend your family time on them. This practice can also help you at work by eliminating administrative tasks so they do not distract you from more important work throughout the week.

Some examples of work you can put into these power hours:

• Scheduling doctor, dentist, and other appointments

• Buying gifts for birthdays and holidays

• Making reservations and plans with family and friends

• Identifying and resolving any childcare coverage issues

• Re-enrolling in the company health plan

Step 1: Identify intellectual, emotional, and time boundaries you would like to set and keep. Be sure to distinguish between what Joe Sanok calls “hard boundaries” (non-negotiables) and “soft boundaries” (preferences).

Step 2: Identify the people and situations that typically violate those boundaries and how they do so.

Step 3: Identify your feelings and behaviors when these situations arise. Nedra Glover Tawwab provides this example: “[I]f you are staying later than you’d like, what’s causing this behavior on your part? What about your job leads you to feel overwhelmed or burned out?”

Step 4: Create a plan to communicate your boundaries or implement structures to prevent violations. As you communicate your boundaries, do so confidently.

Michael Bungay Stanier, The Coaching Habit: “What gets us in trouble is how quickly we commit, without fully understanding what we’re getting ourselves into or even why we’re being asked. Saying Yes more slowly means being willing to stay curious before committing.

“Which means asking more questions:

• Why are you asking me?

• Whom else have you asked?

• When you say this is urgent, what do you mean?

• According to what standard does this need to be completed? By when?

• If I couldn’t do all of this, but could do just a part, what part would you have me do?

• What do you want me to take off my plate so I can do this?”

In his book Essentialism, Greg McKeown provides helpful guidance for saying No that honors your boundaries and helps maintain relationships.

1. The awkward pause.

2. The soft "no" (or the "no but").

3. “Let me check my calendar and get back to you.”

4. Use e-mail bouncebacks.

5. Say, “Yes. What should I deprioritize?”

6. Say it with humor.

7. Use the words “You are welcome to X. I am willing to Y.”

8. “I can't do it, but X might be interested.”

A Kanban board is a tool of the Toyota Production System. At its most basic level, it contains three lists of activities—To do, Doing, and Done.

The first goal of a Kanban board is to make all current activity visible to everyone who needs to know it. Whether digital or analog, it should exist in a location where everyone can see what’s going on. 

A second goal of the Kanban board is to ensure that a team is appropriately focused on only a small number of activities at once. As Madeleine Dore describes in I Didn’t Do the Thing Today, “[Y]ou can have a maximum of three tasks in the middle ‘doing’ column at any given time. Before adding another, you must either complete a task (and then move it to the ‘done’ column) or abandon it, which helps minimize the fatigue caused by switching tasks.”

In the parent survey, setting clear expectations was a frequently mentioned element of success. For example: “Consistency is key. If you let things slide here and there, people will begin to see that whatever you have to leave for (whether it’s pick-up, a workout, to make dinner, etc.) isn’t really that important to you. Even when I know that someone else is handling pick-up, I still leave at the usual time for the sake of consistency.”

I surveyed working parents and asked, “What’s the single best routine or tactic you and your spouse use to create a childcare and household responsibility balance that works for your family?”

Their approaches fell into a few categories. 

1. Split Responsibility by Time of Day

2. Split Responsibility by Day of the Week

3. Split Responsibility by Domain

4. 4. Share Responsibilities

5. Be Flexible and Decide Based on the Needs of the Moment

6. Outsourcing

In The 80/80 Marriage, Nate and Kaley Kemp suggest five guidelines for dividing household responsibilities based on the preferences and skills of both partners:

1. Skill—The person who can do the task better or more efficiently takes it.

2. Interest—The person who likes the task more, or at least dislikes it less, takes it.

3. Standards—The person who cares more or will insist on the task being done a certain way should take it.

4. Shared Success—Choose responsibility based on what makes sense for the overall family goals, even if this doesn’t yield an “equal” split of tasks.

5. Outsourcing—If neither person is good at or wants to do the task, this is a good option.

Nate and Kaley Kemp, The 80/80 Marriage: “While most couples maintain some shared roles […] (things like cooking, doing dishes, or picking up the kids from school), make sure this category doesn’t grow too large. We recommend sharing no more than 25 percent of your roles. The more roles you share, the more room there is for conflict.”

Anne-Marie Slaughter, Unfinished Business: In an article in New York magazine, therapist Barbara Kass calls many of us out on this account: “So many women want to control their husbands’ parenting. ‘Oh, do you have the this? Did you do the that? Don’t forget that she needs this. And make sure she naps.’ Sexism is internalized.” On Huffington Post, dad blogger Aaron Gouveia notes it’s mostly the moms “who claim to be overworked and desperate for dads to do more” who also criticize dads for not doing things right when they do step up. “And by right, I mean their way. I’ve seen dads criticized and made fun of for how they dress the baby [and] for how they feed the baby.”

Madeleine Dore, I Didn’t Do the Thing Today: “If you have the means, you can order in good food, get a rideshare whenever you need it, and orchestrate a convenient life in which friction is reduced—but your engagement is dulled. Perhaps this is one reason people enjoy playing records—the act of getting up, flipping the disc over, and placing the needle back down is a small, delightful challenge that makes the experience more engaging. Small inconveniences always bring me back into the moment—when I’m waiting for a pizza to arrive, for example, I’m able to disappear into the vortex of my devices, whereas if I’m making my own meal, I’m immersed in a task where I can find flow.”

Jennifer Senior, All Joy and No Fun: “As it is, most mothers assume a disproportionate number of deadline-oriented, time-pressured domestic tasks (Dress kids, brush their teeth, drop them off at school; pick them up, take them to piano lessons at 3:00, soccer practice at 4:00, and get dinner on the table by 6:00.) In 2006, the sociologists Marybeth Mattingly and Liana Sayer published a paper noting that women are more likely than men to feel “always rushed,” and that married mothers are 2.2 times more likely to feel “sometimes or always rushed” than single women without children.”

Alan Mulally, former CEO of Ford and Boeing, told the New York Times Corner Office about his approach to time management: “I guess my answer to that comes from the thought of having one integrated life. So I don’t have separate buckets of my life, like my family life or my personal life or my work life. I just have one integrated schedule, and for as long [as] I can remember, the kids have had access to my calendar and my wife has had access to the calendar. They all just build into the calendar whenever they need me.”

After establishing a calendar system, it is helpful to have a routine in which you review the calendar and make needed adjustments. Alan Mulally again: “So we’d sit down every Sunday morning and everybody would get their schedule out. The kids would have their schedules and we’d have ours and everybody would compare schedules. And if they needed a ride or they had a soccer game or they had ballet or they had a school activity, we’d figure it out.”

It’s easy to talk about the calendar but leave out the more important conversation—what each person needs. The point is not to get everything done but to make everyone satisfied with what gets done.

In Having It All...and Making It Work, Quinn Mills tells of how those richer discussions help him make better family decisions:

“I have had many surprises during these conversations, learning that my children’s and even my husband’s time requests are often different than I would have assumed. In fact, they have told me that they don’t like it when I come to every one of their games because it makes them nervous, and they don't perform as well. But they love it when I make them breakfast in the mornings. […] If you have a weekly meeting with your boss to make sure you’re on the same page, why not with your family?”

In What Works for Women at Work, Joan C. Williams and Rachel Dempsey describe one woman’s approach to setting expectations with her kids about their activities: 

[She] tells her children at the beginning of every semester to pick three events they want her to attend. They get to pick, and no matter what, she will be there. This is a common strategy: a Fortune 500 executive told us she used to sit down with her daughter at the beginning of the school year to look over the calendar. Making it clear to your family that they can count on you when you promise you’ll be there can go a long way toward assuaging your own guilt and making your children feel like a priority. 

Joel Peterson, Juggling Glass and Rubber Balls: “I longed for just a simple chat with each child in which I might discover his or her state of being. Were they happy? Did they feel safe? What did they worry about? Who were their friends? What did they need?”

While he intended to schedule time with each kid, the kids did not like it. Instead, Peterson learned that it was easy to start with the younger kids and say, “Tell me about you.” He describes the experience in Juggling Glass and Rubber Balls: “I remember the first few times. It was hard to sit quietly for a minute or more before the child opened up. But when they did, I learned about their worries with teachers, friends, siblings, . . . and me. When we moved to a new city, burdened with recovery from litigation, I failed to reprise our Saturday cadence. I was not only overwhelmed; I was also short-sighted. I wish I’d started this practice of sit-downs early on, while our older children were still young, and then kept refining it. Since nothing is more affirming than listening to another’s feelings, I believe, with practice, I’d have made this a great foundation for emotional security for each child.” 

In the parent survey, one person said, “I try and schedule calls later in the day to give me the flexibility to catch up in the AM or to come in later if I need to.“ My wife Erin said, “I have a standing appointment from 5–6 p.m. every day for ‘commute’ which stops people from putting things on my calendar. I’m often still at work after that time, but it’s on my terms.”

Estimate how much time “unexpected” meetings take on your calendar and start to hold an equivalent amount of time going forward. If you typically need two hours of response meetings, for example, you might hold two hour-long blocks on your calendar. This will give you a safety valve that allows you to absorb these meetings without derailing your overall calendar or scheduling after-hours meetings. This is spillover time.

If your average commute is 30 minutes on average, plan for 60. If you plan for your commute to go exactly to plan, that’s a recipe for stress and missed deadlines. If it takes the normal time, you have space to breathe before starting your home role.

Ketanji Brown Jackson, Lovely One: “A group of us immediately put our fellow parents on the list of people who were approved to pick up our children. Thereafter, we would communicate with the other parents in our group if we were running late and needed that assistance. Any parent who signed out other children would look after them for a brief period, either staying right there in the school’s lobby or taking them to a local pizza joint, until their parents arrived.”

The first step in identifying the BS in your role is to identify what is core. “‘Core’ can be tricky to define,” Anne Helen Petersen and Charlie Warzel write in the book Out of Office, “but it might be the work that would come first if, say, you had only ten hours to complete all your tasks in a week.”

Second, it’s worth identifying what professors Linda Babcock, Brenda Peyser, Lise Vesterlund, and Laurie Weingart call nonpromotable tasks (NPTs). “Maybe you’re the person who trains new hires, takes notes at a meeting, organizes the holiday party, fills in for absent colleagues, or handles that low-revenue and time-consuming client. Everyone benefits when these NPTs get done. But sadly, and too often, the person who does them ends up robbed of valuable time and the promotable work that actually grows paychecks and careers.”professors Linda Babcock, Brenda Peyser, Lise Vesterlund, and Laurie Weingart call nonpromotable tasks (NPTs). “Maybe you’re the person who trains new hires, takes notes at a meeting, organizes the holiday party, fills in for absent colleagues, or handles that low-revenue and time-consuming client. Everyone benefits when these NPTs get done. But sadly, and too often, the person who does them ends up robbed of valuable time and the promotable work that actually grows paychecks and careers.”

In Designing Your New Work Life, Stanford professors Bill Burnett and Dave Evans outline an exercise to help you identify what you like and don’t like about your current role and what it might look like to change it.

1. Imagine that, having exhausted all other possibilities, you are going to quit your job.

2. Create a job description that includes everything you do—include the stuff that you are supposed to do and stuff that you actually do. Make it a comprehensive list of all your responsibilities.

3. Now review those responsibilities, and see which ones could potentially be delegated to someone else. Cross those out.

4. Review the remaining responsibilities, and see which ones you do not enjoy doing. Cross those out, too.

5. Review what’s left on your list—the items that are left are the responsibilities and tasks that are part of your job description that you enjoy. This is your core job description.

6. Make a list of the new and valuable things you would like to do, if you had the time, training, and support. This is the stuff that would be either helpful to your organization or related to your learning something new, or both.

7. Recompile the list—this is your new core job description. It is designed around your current skills and your emerging new interests. It shouldn’t fit the “job” you currently have; it’s the one you want.

8. It shouldn’t be a fantasy job description.

9. Once you’ve completed this imaginary job redesign, wait a day or so and then come back and read it. Is it consistent, does it describe a job that makes sense? Could someone with your skills and abilities be expected to be good at this job?

10. Now imagine that you are able to find the job you’ve just described. Really imagine it, and inhabit what it feels like to quit your current job for this one. There is no risk, it’s just in your imagination. Then imagine going through the steps you’d have to do to make this new job real.

11. List those steps. 

Bill Burnett and Dave Evans, Designing Your New Work Life: “You might also try job crafting to turn the job you have into the one you want. Again, baby steps are key. Focusing on incremental changes can add up to big results.”

Greg McKeown, Effortless: “A Done for the Day list is not a list of everything we theoretically could do today, or a list of everything we would love to get done. [...] Instead, this is a list of what will constitute meaningful and essential progress. [...] Ask yourself, ‘If I complete everything on this list, will it leave me feeling satisfied by the end of the day?’”

Liz Wiseman, “Is Your Burnout from Too Much Work or Too Little Impact?”: “Instead of finishing at all costs, you might need to cut your losses and let some projects go. If you suspect you are engaged in an unwinnable battle or working on yesterday’s priorities, ask yourself: (1) Is this still relevant, given changes in the larger environment or market? (2) Is this still important to the organization and my leadership? (3) Is this something we can still be successful at, even if we don’t finish?”

Greg McKeown, Essentialism: We can apply this approach to our commitments outside of work as well, whether that be social obligations, household tasks, or kids’ activities. To find these, McKeown suggests asking, “Are there commitments you routinely make to customers, colleagues, friends or even family members that you have always assumed made a big difference to them but that in fact they might barely notice?” By delaying, scaling back, or quiet quitting on those obligations for a short period of time, we can test whether our assumptions about the tasks’ importance are valid.

Amantha Imber, “Stop Trying to Manage Your Time”: “‘So much of our lives are programmed to add tasks and commitments,’ [Rachel] Botsman told me. ‘We’re not taught how to subtract or take things away.’ To overcome the feeling of the never-ending to-do list, Botsman has an ongoing appointment with herself on the last Friday of every month, when she sets aside time to consider what she wants to stop doing in her work.”

Sharon Meers and Joanna Strober, Getting to 50/50: “A 2006 study of women on Wall Street found that successful women were those who were expert in a specific techincal niche—their results were quantifiable and clearly attributable to them.”

Janna Koretz, “When Your Career Becomes Your Whole Identity”: “When jobs are paired with a big paycheck, individuals can find themselves launched into a new socioeconomic class. It wasn’t just the homes, cars, vacations, and gadgets that Dan suddenly couldn’t live without—it was the friends, the dinner parties, the charity galas. Our identities are highly influenced by how we present ourselves to others. When someone forms an identity focused on wealth, achievement, and influence, they tie themselves to the high-paying career that got them there.”

Bill Burnett and Dave Evans, Designing Your New Work Life: “If and when you know you need to leave, then the time has come for you to choose to quit. Reframe quitting as a choice. You choose to quit. Positive psychology and self-determination theory all agree: What you choose to do in life is what gives your life meaning and purpose. So make it a point to quit with a purpose.”

We can build our savings to the point where we always feel confident about our professional flexibility. In What Works for Women at Work, Joan Williams and Rachel Dempsey cite a professional who “had a professor in business school who told his students to always have a ‘F**k you fund”—some money set aside that gives you the flexibility to leave your job without having a new one lined up.”

There’s no greater power than knowing you have a “f**k you” in your back pocket at all times!

Morgan Housel, The Psychology of Money: “We’re so far committed to the independence camp that we’ve done things that make little sense on paper. We own our house without a mortgage, which is the worst financial decision we’ve ever made but the best money decision we’ve ever made.”

Joshua Becker, The More of Less: “It’s simple enough: By buying fewer things, we spend less money. Not just to acquire things in the first place but also to manage and maintain our goods. Maybe your path to financial freedom comes not from earning more but from owning less.”

Joshua Becker, The More of Less: “Smaller homes are less expensive. They cost less in both purchase and upkeep (insurance, taxes, heating, cooling, electricity, and so on). This results in more money for other things. And it results in less debt, less risk, less stress, less environmental impact, and less temptation to accumulate more material possessions.”

D. Quinn Mills, Sasha K. Mattu, and Kirstin Hornby, Having It All...and Making It Work: “We suggest that you evaluate your balance twice a year as a family to assess life goals and direction, and monthly as an individual to think about the functional, day-to-day aspects of balance.”

Retreats are about creating a physical and mental space that allows you to think creatively and outside of your day-to-day concerns. When we plan, it’s easy to take what’s already on our plates as the default, which can make whatever “strategy” we come up with really just a form of: “How can we do today’s stuff a tad bit better?”

Get My (Stuff) Together: An Annual Strategy Retreat Workbook

Greg McKeown, Essentialism: “You can apply zero-based budgeting to your own endeavors. Instead of trying to budget your time on the basis of existing commitments, assume that all bets are off. All previous commitments are gone. Then begin from scratch, asking which you would add today. You can do this with everything from the financial obligations you have to projects you are committed to, even relationships you are in. Every use of time, energy, or resources has to justify itself anew. If it no longer fits, eliminate it altogether.”

Do you have a list of all the projects you have in progress right now?

I have often asked executives that question. In some cases, I ask it when they say they have too much on their plates. In other cases, I ask after they express difficulty getting their bosses to understand why they weren’t able to respond to every request immediately. Without a reliable view of current activities, it is harder for many leaders to track progress, prioritize the most important activities, and manage new requests from others.

That same dynamic holds in our personal lives, and that’s why you need a project inventory.

Having a foundational list of projects enables you to manage the chaos better, but creating the list is just step one. To get the most from this exercise, you also want to look for ways to substantially reduce the number of projects on your list so you can eliminate the chaos. 

Blog Post: Getting Your Arms Around the Chaos