Seeking Balance Between Work and Life in a 24/7 World

Even before cell phones became as ubiquitous as disposable pens, the long work week and the blurring of the distinctions between professional and personal life were contributing to bookseller burnout and work-related stress. Booksellers are not alone. Witness the Wall Street Journal, the paper of record for corporate America, which has a regular column on work and family, written by Sue Shellenbarger, as well as one on "A Balanced Life," written by Tara Parker-Pope & Kyle Pope.

Booksellers, like many other entrepreneurs, are working harder these days to achieve success in business without mortgaging their personal lives. But what are the key first steps to achieving a more balanced life?

"We must begin by taking a step back from our hurried lives and think about what we really want," explained Maggie Jackson, author of What’s Happening to Home? Balancing Work, Life, and Refuge in the Information Age (Sorin Books). "What do we want to accomplish at work and at home? How do we want to spend our time on earth? How do we envision a balanced life? September 11 prompted many people to think about these questions, in some cases for the first time. But it shouldn’t always take a tragedy to make us stop and ponder how we live our lives," she said.

"Once we begin to understand our goals and desires, we can take steps to realize them," she noted. Often, a seemingly enormous complex goal, such as achieving balance, "is really made up of dozens of daily decisions. What time do we leave work at the end of the day? Do we promise ourselves that, without fail, we will go on one field trip a year with our child," Jackson said.

Even when you know you’re out of control, it’s hard to stop and create new priorities or to change work patterns. One key reason is that the 24/7, work-first lifestyle is so highly respected in American society, a key point underscored by J. Walker Smith and Robert K. Johnston in their book, Life Is Not Work, Work Is Not Life, Simple Reminders for Finding Balance in a 24-7 World (Wildcat Canyon Press).

For Smith and Johnston a key first step in taming the frenetic work pace involves awareness. "Make sure that the things you’re focused on are the right things to get the job done," advised Smith. "We let ourselves be driven by rules and procedures that don’t make sense…. People present themselves with a false dichotomy. If you achieve balance, then you’re giving up success. Science and experience indicate that we’re more successful when we’re relaxed, more rested and more in control of our actions."

Johnston and Walker offer these suggestions for seeking moderation and success in meeting business goals:

1. Set limits on your work hours. It’s still possible with deadlines. Delegate. Prioritize. Eliminate. Just say no. Don’t take the company laptop home every weekend.
   
2. Examine your motives in working or traveling excessively. Are you trying to impress your boss? Compete with peers? Prove to yourself how tough you are? Avoid problems at home? Become conscious about whom you’re shortchanging -- spouse, family, friends, or yourself.
   
3. Listen to your body. When you don’t rest, exercise, or eat properly, your body will communicate its distress through fatigue pain, accidents, disease, and premature aging.
   
4. List to your heart. Rejuvenate a spiritual life: go back to church or synagogue, read the sacred texts of your faith, or simply take a walk in the woods to bring your inner life back into focus.
   

Jackson told BTW that in writing her book she interviewed a secretary from Michigan who found that she wasn’t having fun at home anymore because of the amount of work she was taking home each evening. She began making changes in her life, experimenting until she found a better balance. First, she turned in her pager and began limiting her after-hours work. Next, she also began spending time again in a home arts-and-crafts room that she called her "little refuge."

"Take moments when you can to make a different kind of connection to things in your life," said Smith. "I love to visit the Grand Canyon. Nothing can track me down there. I have a river pebble that I carry around with me, that I can pull out as a reminder that what I’m doing [must] make sense in a bigger picture."

Spending an ample amount of time with her two young daughters was "the bigger picture" for Jackson. She describes in her book how her three-day-a-week job as a newspaper columnist on the workplace demanded more of her work time, which extended to a fourth day. But it was her bedtime routine with her daughters that made her examine the blurring lines between home and life.

"My daughters often beg for bedtime stories, and I routinely oblige them with cuddles in the dark and tales of fairies and elves and brave children," she writes. "But not too long ago, rather than linger, I found myself hurrying to give them their last sips of water, and if they were especially talkative, I’d snap, ‘Go to bed! Mommy has to finish her work!’ That gave me pause."

"We are more mobile, and more flexible, and we need private lives that suit this new world," said Jackson. "At the same time, we are connected, interrupted, and global, and never has it been more important to try and preserve the home as a place of refuge. If we don’t take care to keep the idea of sanctuary in our home, where else will we find places of rest, intimacy, and reflection?"

"Balance is an incremental kind of thing," said Smith. "At some point, you have to add things up. You have to step out of your routine." He advises those seeking balance to take small changes and try to develop new habits. "It takes 21 days of doing the same thing every day to develop a new habit," said Smith. "You have to take it one day at a time."

People have to find their own point of equilibrium. "Some of the sacrifices we have made, we should reflect if that’s a sacrifice that matters. There are moments I had to realize that the sacrifices I made weren’t working," Smith pointed out.

One of these sacrifices centered on his own denial behavior in handling his diabetes. After passing out in a business meeting because of a severe insulin reaction, he deliberately kept his blood sugar high -- even though he knew this could lead to complications later.

In Life Is Not Work, Work Is Not Life the authors note in reminder number 15 -- "Too Much of a Good Thing" -- that "work itself is not the problem; it’s work without balance that’s the problem. And by creating a balance between work and life, every one of us can own an equal share of riches." Smith explained, "The pace of our lives will be driven if we try to do everything at once. We’re working this hard because we want to keep up, and we have to decide if keeping up is worth it."

Smith believes that entrepreneurs such as booksellers have great potential to find balance in their lives if they have a willingness to commit as much ingenuity to their personal lives as they do in their work. "Both Rob and I came to a point in our lives that we have restored balance to our lives. Writing about it brings about closure."

Jackson offers this advice in preserving the sanctuary of homes: Redraw boundaries within your homes so that you can preserve times for rest, relaxation, and togetherness. By doing this, we can create homes that are both workplaces and sanctuaries by thinking about times for home, and the spaces of home. -- Gayle Herbert Robinson