On balancing work and family

One of the most challenging tasks for me as a working mother is balancing work and family.   It doesn’t matter which role I’m working on- I feel guilty about not spending enough time on the other one.  The end result is no matter how hard I work on a given day, at the end of it some part of me feels dissatisfied with how well I performed.  Many working mothers are in much more demanding jobs than I am- how do they do it?  Can a working mother “have it all?”

I turned to the experts.  I started reading Women at the Topby Diane F. Halpern and Fanny M. Cheung.  They interviewed 62 women in top leadership positions in the US, China, and Hong Kong, that either had children or took care of adult members of their families.   These women DO seem to have it all.  Not only are they successful both at home and at work, but they manage both roles calmly.  Most of them also had rich, rewarding relationships with their husbands.   Here are some of the things I learned:

• Prioritize the important.  Make a list.  Decide what comes first, second, and so on.  This is the first step to fitting everything together.
• Budget your time carefully around your priorities.  If you want to spend quality time with the kids on the weekend, put it on your calendar.  Do your best to keep to that schedule.  Make sure unimportant things don’t eat into time you set aside for the important.
• If it isn’t important, find somebody else to do it.  Outsource!  Enlist other family members to help with things that don’t add value to your day.  This may mean asking them to handle errands, cook, or clean.  If there is nobody to help at home with these things, then pay somebody to do it.  Not only does this allow you to focus on thekey tasks, but it reduces your stress level. 
• Be prepared to let go of your personal time.  The high-achieving women in this particular book set aside hobbies and other enjoyable things.  They had their priorities and understood that to reach the top, they couldn’t have a lot of activities that delayed their progress.
•  Focus on one thing at a time.  Although these women were incredible multi-taskers, when it came to the most important things, they would focus on them 100%.  When they had family time scheduled, they were intensely focused on their children.  When they were working, that was it- they were working. 
• If you need more time, sleep less.  This is not healthy long-term, as we all need a good night’s sleep in order to maintain our health and our performance both at work and at home.  Just the same, many of these women claimed that they stayed up late at night to fit in a few more hours of work.
• Choose a supportive husband.  Most of the women the authors quoted were more successful than their husbands.  In most cases, they women had found husbands who were not threatened by their success.  These men were proud of their wives and were willing to take on more activities at home to help out.  In the cases where the husbands were not supportive, the marriages usually ended in divorce.  When they re-married, they seemed to find the right type of partner the second time around.

Although my specific reason for reading this book was to find out how to balance work and family, it also showed me how much effort it takes to be a working mother at the top of her field.  It put my own life into perspective.  The next time I become tense because there is too much “To Do” list for the time available, I will remember this book and relax.  I’ll make sure I’m working on the things that matter most, and try not to worry about the rest.  And speaking of “rest”, I’ll probably set the alarm clock an hour earlier the next day, too.

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