Having it all ... and making it work

About a year and a half ago, I did a presentation at work on work-life balance (download here). When I worked in our marketing department, we had a program called the "Marketing Learning Program" in which each person if the group would pick a book and present it to the rest of the group - kind of like a book club but only one person read the book. I chose the book Having It All ... And Making It Work. For any of you who have struggled with work-life balance, I would highly recommend this book. It's a fast read and quite helpful. The basic premise of the book is that everything comes with a price - even achieving balance. We need to decide what is most important to us and focus on those things - and be willing to accept the consequences of dropping or ignoring other things. The authors caution that lower-level matters may masquerade as first-tier priorities, but we can tell what matters most when you have to let go of something. Also, the key to having work-life balance isn’t to become good or wise at making tradeoffs, but rather to minimize the number of tradeoffs we make. A tradeoff is always a win-lose situation because it occurs between those things we want most. Many of our balancing decisions are actually between something we want more (a first-tier item) and something else that we want less (a second-tier item); this is not a tradeoff.

The other thing I found really helpful - and practical - about this book is that it acknowledges the importance of the work side of work-life balance. Many books on this topic make it seem that family should be such a priority in our lives that we are willing to sacrifice all else. The practical reality is that professional/work life and personal/family life offer different rewards and different forms of fulfillment. Therefore, it's just as dangerous to focus on family to the exclusion of work as it is to focus on work to the exclusion of family. The key (obviously) is balance.

The last thing I'll say about this book is that a lot of what they talk about may sound like common sense, but it’s not common practice. Therefore, I'd strongly recommend that you read the book (or my preso) with an open mind and a determination to actually apply what you learn.