Raise your hand if any of the following things are true of you:
I have regularly worked longer hours than I am contractually required to and/or skipped at least one entire break in a working day.
I have intentionally gone to work ill or felt incredibly guilty about calling in sick.
I frequently feel worried that my work isn't good enough and that at some point I will be "found out".
The more I am praised or recognised for my work, the more pressure I put on myself to live up to my own impossible expectations.
I'm going to have to put my hand down now because it's hard to type. (Which is to say, me too.) I would be embarrassed admitting something so personal but I think it's true of so many people I know in life in general and in libraries specifically. It's something I've been consciously working on for the last year or so but like all progress, it's seldom straightforward.
I won't go into the specifics of why I'm writing about this now, suffice it to say that my co-workers are fantastic and helped me realise pretty quickly that I was working WAY too hard for a couple of weeks and not taking care of myself. Part of it was time pressure and part of it was genuinely enjoying what I was doing enough to not want to switch off at 5:00, but underneath that there was lurking the ever-present sense that I needed to earn my value through productivity.
Important things to remember, by the incomparably lovely Stevie Wilson.
That is not and has never been true. In the comic above I feel like the artist is dealing with a sense of dissatisfaction with her "day job" as a barista, but the same feeling can be present if you love your job. Indeed, I think it's even harder to separate your sense of value from what you do all day when you're passionate about what you do. Being a research support librarian is my dream job and I love it, but that doesn't mean there isn't more to me. And that other stuff is worth cultivating and caring for. You, yourself, alone, doing nothing, accomplishing nothing, have value.
This week a very lovely and helpful person sent me this article, which I of course related to massively and which reminded me about all the work I've been trying to do on keeping everything in balance:
This is just a library. It’s not heart surgery. This work will all be here when we get to it.
So, take a minute and assess your workload and your projects. Are any of them emergencies? Ask your boss for a meeting and ask for help prioritizing the work if you need to. Whatever you do, Shiny New Librarians, do not try and be the hero and overdo it because we need you. We need you to do all of the cool great things you’re doing now, but we also need you to make it into management without being burned out and angry. We need you to run the next generation of libraries and protect the new people from themselves.
It's reminded me to be more mindful, to be able to put things aside and know that it will be okay. Nothing's going to catch fire if I don't finish that report RIGHT NOW. It's reminded me that I am sometimes so worried and stressed about living up to expectations that I make it harder for myself to do good and meaningful work. So, I've streamlined things a bit, worked on my task management, tried to reign in a bit of my multi-tasking so that I'm really focused on what I'm doing at any given moment and tried to be more disciplined about actually going home at a reasonable hour. My graph is still more of a squiggly line than a nice straight line, but as long as the squiggles are trending in the right direction I think I'll call it a win!
I hope that if you put your hand up at the beginning of this post you'll think about what's behind that and remember that you, too, have value as yourself.
As far as first world, middle class problems go, few are as prevalent and perennial as the problem of balancing one's career with the rest of one's life. The thing is, dividing the problem into two parts - work, and then everything else outside of work - is a tremendous oversimplification. I don't know anyone's life who can be divided so cleanly. Even if you take kids out of the equation (which I have), you still have friends and family, fitness, mental/physical health, cooking, keeping your home and garden under control and maybe even altering it in fairly major ways, hobbies you love, classes you take, travel, decompression time by yourself... the list could go on and on.
Work is not so easily segregated into a single category either when you add to the day-to-day activities things like committees, special projects, long-term goals, professional development, relationships and networking etc. There are certainly times when I feel incredibly motivated to join everything, participate in everything, take on everything, and there are others when I am perfectly content to not have any challenges greater than a trolley of books to be labeled and a stack of archives to reshelve. So how does one cultivate all these disparate facets without burning out?
I used to think that achieving work/life balance involved stumbling upon the magic ratio where one's time was divided up into all the various hobbies, interests, social engagements and professional development activities and that was it. Once you'd settled on The Timetable you were good to go and the reason I hadn't achieved a balance yet was because I needed how to figure out how to divide all the hours of the day. But life doesn't work like that. Plans fall through or crop up unexpectedly, and, more importantly, I don't work like that. I used to think that balance was something I would have to impose upon myself because I'm the sort of person who dives passionately into one thing to the exclusion of others for a while, only to reemerge with a new passion a few weeks or months later.
The revelation for me has been accepting that balance is not a fixed ratio but a point that is constantly shifting beneath me in response to external circumstances and where my own energy and passion is guiding me.
Balance means keeping some things ticking over with minimal effort/energy expended while I pursue my latest passion, but also recognising that whatever it is, no matter how passionate I am about it at the moment, it isn't the be-all-and-end-all thing I'm going to dedicate the rest of my life to. It's taken me over 30 years to recognise that pattern and understand how to make it work in my favour rather than feeling like it's a fatal flaw that will stop me from ever achieving balance.
Lately I've been working on riding the ebbs and flows of energy and making them work for me. Here's a brief run-down of the different facets that make up work/life balance for me and how I'm learning to maintain them without letting them take over:
Making - Although I'm not very artistically talented in any specific way, creative expression has always been very important to me, whether it's writing, photography, drawing, crafting, dancing, singing or curating (this includes things like putting together Pinterest boards and Spotify playlists). Sometimes I have absolute bucket-loads of creative energy and all I want to do is make stuff. This makes me seek out creative projects at work and/or at home. It's worth knowing that I can happily ride the wave of this creative energy for a while and accomplish a lot in a short space of time but that it will burn out pretty quickly, so I should be careful that I don't start so many things that I can't finish any of them before I dry up. Luckily, this sort of mood comes along pretty regularly so I can pick things up again at a later date when my creative energy is bubbling over again.
Moving - It's taken me a very long time to realise that I derive a huge amount of energy and happiness from being fit and active. As the sort of kid who loathed P.E. and organised sports, it was surprising to get to university and realise that I LOVE working out, I LOVE a physical challenge and I LOVE having a lot of movement in my life. I can turn sloth-like very easily, however, so to keep balance it's important for me to have physical activity be part of a routine. Roller Derby was great for this because even if I didn't feel like going to practice I would still go because it was an obligation. Then I'd invariably have a good time and feel better for it. Without the structure of Roller Derby, I kind of lost motivation for about 6 months, but I now have a personal trainer and I'm getting back into a regular schedule of exercise and feeling a lot better for it. It's good to know how important that discipline and routine of exercise is to my overall well-being so now I will try to keep that in mind as something that should be a part of my life at all times.
Learning - This includes reading, practicing something new, problem-solving, doing something unexpected, basically just introducing something novel into my life. Like "making", this is something that I can do at work by attending classes, developing my skills or just trying to do something in a different way. Sometimes I have a lot of energy to do this, while other times I really don't feel like I can take any more on because I'm getting overwhelmed and can't focus on anything. Once again it's about using the energy while I have it but not taking on too much because I know it won't last indefinitely.
Friends/Family - This one doesn't need too much explanation. If I don't have time to see friends and family, I start to feel super guilty and overwhelmed. Everyone needs time for relationships outside of work and this tends to need to be the most flexible aspect because it depends on when other people are available or need you to be in their lives. In my mind time with friends and family is never time wasted. It's the priority, even if it's not a constant.
For me the most difficult part of trying to strike a balance is accepting that I will not always have the same level of energy for particular activities - that it's a moving, shifting quantity and that my balancing point will differ from week to week or even moment to moment. When I have a lot of energy for a particular activity I find it very difficult to accept that it will change. At the time it feels like I can take on anything and everything and I have almost unlimited enthusiasm for a particular thing. Often it feels like a "Eureka" moment and it seems like I've finally discovered my calling in life as I practically fall in love with whatever the latest thing is. But this has happened so often in my life that I know now to be prepared for the bubble to burst, for reality to set in, and for my enthusiasm to wane as quickly as it arrived. It's not that I have no interest in it anymore, but I just have less energy and passion for it. I've never stopped being interested in astronomy, for example, but I stopped wanting to be an astronaut when I was about 15.
I don't think these things have been a waste of time simply because I didn't go on to "do" anything with them. It's nice to be able to contribute to conversations about astronomy, say, or at least know enough to ask questions of people who know it better than I do. Same with music, history, art and any of the other things I've been passionate about in my life. It's the newness, the learning, the dwelling in beginner's mind that makes it worthwhile. If I'm shaking myself out of routine and getting excited about stuff, it doesn't matter what that stuff is or whether I "do" something with it. At least I've kept things fresh and exciting. Maybe I'll never be a master of any one trade, but at least I'll have had an interesting life and taken advantage of my natural magpie-like tendencies to find my own individual work/life balance.
While you're pursuing your passions it's important to learn how to budget your finite mental energy by making as many other things automatic as possible. That keeps all the facets of your life ticking over at a base rate so that you're not abandoning your friends to do your hobbies, for example, or letting your physical exercise collapse completely when you're diving into a big project at work. The video below is a really good explanation of this idea. I highly recommend it!
So that's what I'm working on at the moment. I can feel myself shifting out of a very work-focused period into a time when I have a lot of physical energy, so I might need to consolidate my projects at work, maybe delegate a few things to my co-workers to keep the momentum going and use this opportunity to reflect on what I've done in the last month or so and what I can do better next time the career energy ramps up again. It might seem a little chaotic from the outside but I'm learning that this really works for me, so I guess I'll run with it!
Where does the time go? Image by cmcbrown on Flickr
The title of this post comes from my High School Economics teacher, Mr. Shannon. From his list of what I'm sure were very astute financial tips, most of which are long-forgotten, this one has always stuck in my mind most firmly. I found myself thinking about it while considering how I'm going to balance my time over the coming year between work, roller derby, my personal life and working on career development and my book.
The idea behind "Pay yourself first" is this: as you earn money, no matter how small the amount, always put something aside into a savings account before spending it on the month to month costs, a new outfit or whatever (I've not been brilliant at doing this lately, but that is beside the point).
Time management is all about priorities. Of course some priorities are non-negotiable. I will always need to turn up to my full-time job, and I will always need to get exercise. However, it is the negotiable, unstructured time that needs to be carefully managed, particularly if you have some kind of non-work project, skill, etc. that you want to make progress with. It is extremely easy to lose hours to surfing the internet, watching TV, browsing in a bookshop etc. All of that is fine, even necessary sometimes, but it can be the enemy of anything you want to do outside the normal spheres of work, home, friends and clubs/sports/organisations.
That's why I think it's a good idea to "Pay yourself first" - make regularly scheduled time for those other projects like professional development reading, writing your book, perfecting your cooking, practicing piano, or whatever it is you want to make progress with in your own time - and STICK WITH IT. Treat that time as non-negotiable. You may feel like you're missing out on time with friends, or TV you want to watch (seriously, just binge watch it when it comes out on DVD, guys), or whatever, but you picked your priorities so you only have yourself to blame.
My partner suggested that we have a "professional development hour" once a week where we read or write something tangentially job-related and then discuss it with each other. I'm hoping we actually do this because it means that is time during which I can't do anything else but make progress on my own things and I'll have the chance to reflect by talking to my very smart and sympathetic partner about it. Hopefully I'll be better at that than the financial version.
