A new book, “Beyond Juggling—Rebalancing
Your Busy Life” offers alternative strategies for achieving work-life
balance
By Shari Lifland
 If
you’re like most people, you wear a lot of hats—manager,
employee, parent, community member, friend, etc. And to handle all of
these competing responsibilities, you’ve probably refined the
delicate art of “juggling.” But according to a new book,
“Beyond Juggling: Rebalancing Your Busy Life” (Berrett-Koehler
Publishers, Inc. 2002), although 80% of workers use juggling as the
“default” approach to work-life balance, the truth is, juggling
just doesn’t work.
The authors, Kurt Sandholtz, Brooklyn Derr, Kathy
Buckner and Dawn Carlson, are a team of consultants, educators and researchers
who have identified five alternative strategies (Alternating, Outsourcing,
Bundling, Techflexing and Simplifying) for achieving work-life balance:
Alternating: They want it all but not
all at once. They switch back and forth between intensive focus on their
work and intensive focus on non-work life.
Outsourcing: They want to have it all,
not do it all. They prioritize those activities in which they want to
be personally involved, then find ways to hire out the rest.
Bundling: They involve themselves in
fewer activities, but they get more mileage out of them. They look for
activities that cover multiple purposes at one time.
Techflexing: They leverage technology
so they can conduct their work from almost anywhere, anytime. As the
name implies, the key to this strategy isn’t just technology,
but flexibility. They don’t use technology to increase the work
hours in a day, but rather to liberate those work hours from a rigid
structure.
Simplifying: They have decided they
don’t want it all. They are willing to make some sacrifices in
order to gain greater freedom, from stress, minutia, and the rat race.
According to the authors, “uccessful rebalancers
use these alternatives in combination to stay on course toward their
definition of work-life satisfaction.” If you would like to take
a self-assessment to learn about your own work-life options, click
here.
AMA’s Shari Lifland recently spoke to Kurt
Sandholtz, one of the book’s co-authors, for some insight into
the world “beyond juggling:
AMA: What are the essential elements of
a “balanced life?” Are they the same across the board for
everyone?
Kurt Sandholtz: We like to think in terms of the
“balance triangle,” with three basic elements: paid work,
relationships and self-care. Of course no two people balance these in
the same way. Triangles are great for illustrating tradeoffs: the angles
add up to 180 degrees, so if one angle grows wider, at least one of
the other two must get narrower. Similarly, if one of the three elements
of balance—our jobs, for instance—starts expanding, the
other two areas invariably become smaller.
Nearly everyone is trying to balance their commitments
in these three areas—job, friends/family and personal interests
(hobbies, recreation, fitness, personal growth, etc.).
Our research uncovered some interesting gender differences
in the tradeoffs we make. Men tend to sacrifice friends and family in
order to spend more time on the job and still have time for their other
interests. Women, on the other hand, often sacrifice their personal
needs, including the most basic self-care of all—sleep.
AMA: In your book you write, “If you’re
serious about achieving better balance in your life, we’re convinced
that the least promising approach is to grit your teeth and keep trying
to do it all.” That’s so interesting. There was a time when
we (especially women) were told that we could “have it all”—the
challenging, rewarding job, the perfect marriage and family, community
involvement, etc. Did that turn out to be a lie?
KS: “Lie” is perhaps too strong a word.
Maybe it was more of a dream, an ideal. Life is a sprawling smorgasbord
of opportunities. The natural impulse is to grab the biggest plate we
can find and load it up with generous portions of everything. Then we
discover that in our zeal to sample the whole buffet, we end up not
savoring anything; we don’t really enjoy the meal. We’re
stuffed to the gills, but we somehow didn’t get enough of the
few items that were exquisite. In the work-life cafeteria line, we’re
all kids with eyes bigger than our stomachs.
Of course, most of us are incredibly fortunate to
live in a time and place that offers so much. Let’s not forget
that. The challenge of abundance is infinitely preferable to that of
scarcity. But it’s still a challenge, and it spawns a scarcity
of its own—scarcity of time and energy.
AMA: We live in challenging times, to put
it mildly. On the one hand, our economy is in the midst of a downturn—many
people have lost their jobs and those who survived the cuts fear that
they may be next. They’re working harder than ever, often with
fewer resources. Yet, having survived the horrors of 9-11, people’s
work/life priorities have shifted. What advice can you give to people
who are determined to find balance between work and life?
KS: The key message of our book is this: You’re
constantly making choices about your work-life balance, whether you
realize it or not. Step back and examine the choices you’re making.
Usually, these are reactive--playing the cards you’re dealt, coping
with each challenge as it crops up--not guided by any kind of master
plan. Yet the most successful balancers we talked to had made conscious
choices that yielded them greater work-life satisfaction.
These choices need not be drastic, just deliberate.
One individual we interviewed had effectively rebalanced her life by
following a simple mantra: “tart small and back off from there.”
Choose one small change—an idea or technique from the five strategies
described in the book—and stick with it. Once it has become a
habit, move on to another mini-change and so on until you’ve achieved
a more satisfying—and sustainable—mixture of work, relationships,
and self-care.
AMA: Most people working outside the home
would describe themselves as jugglers. What’s wrong with that?
Aren’t there any happy jugglers out there?
KS: In all fairness, we have met some “happy
jugglers”—people with boundless energy, incredible discipline,
low need for sleep and supportive behind-the-scenes spouses, nannies
and/or maids. They almost make it look easy—and make the rest
of us feel inadequate. You get the impression that if they weren’t
juggling with such grace and intensity, they’d die of boredom.
If they can keep it up, I say more power to them. I just worry that
stress fractures may go unnoticed in their lives until they become debilitating.
AMA: Americans are often described as workaholics.
Is it true that we spend more time on the job and obsessing about work
than do our colleagues around the world? Also what can we learn from
other cultures about work-life balance?
KS: There’s both hard and soft evidence to
suggest that U.S. workers are somehow hard-wired for workaholism. Political
economist Robert Reich offers a fascinating counterpoint, however. In
our highly-developed information economy, he argues, professional employment
has never been more lucrative (i.e., the dotcom bubble) nor less secure
(i.e., the dotcom bubble). Little wonder we feel pressure to “make
hay while the sun shines.” He predicts other nations will become
equally work-obsessed as their economies make the full transition to
the information age. Witness the demise of teatime in the U.K., for
instance, or the Spanish siesta.
While we find Reich’s analysis hard to refute,
we still see important lessons to be learned from other cultures. For
example, U.S. workers spend more hours on the job than those of any
other industrialized nation. Yet we are not the leaders in GDP per hour
of labor. Both France and Belgium—cultures famous for their short
work weeks and long vacations—top us in this regard.
Businesspeople in Thailand explain the importance
of taking their minds “off-line” periodically, to meditate
and restore their spirits. Scandinavian colleagues chide us for our
devotion to preventive maintenance on our machinery, while ignoring
such maintenance for our people. For corporations in competitive industries
where top talent is the only source of sustainable advantage, we can
no longer afford to treat employees’ work-life balance as anything
less than a long-term strategic issue.
In short, work-life attitudes and policies in the
rest of the industrialized world can cause us to question some of our
work-life assumptions—which, in turn, can help us make more thoughtful,
conscious choices about the way we balance our work, relationships and
personal rejuvenation.
For more information about “Beyond Juggling—Rebalancing
Your Busy Life,” go to www.beyondjuggling.com
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