WORK-LIFE BALANCE
8/13/25, originally written in January, 2021
For many people, work-life balance largely means, “How do I keep work from enveloping everything”, so I’ll focus on that issue. What I’m about to describe may not work for you, especially given that I am a professor, and your job constraints may be quite different. Even so, here are six guidelines I’ve found useful.
David Raup was one of my professors in graduate school, and he set the tone for me. Dave was a giant in the field, immensely respected, a member of the National Academy of Sciences. Dave arrived every day about 8:30, worked until lunch, ate with the graduate students, smoked a cigarette, then went back to work until five. He’d leave his office empty-handed and go home (and this was before the internet, so he really wasn’t taking work home). We didn’t know what Dave did after he left, but it was something besides work. That someone of Dave’s stature did this was a clear message that work needn’t swallow all your time.
When you are at work, focus on work. This will be easier if work time is limited, because work time becomes limited and therefore valuable. Avoid distractions: don’t leave your email on, just check it a couple of times a day, and when you do, handle those emails then. Turn off social media, and avoid web-surfing. Stay focused on what’s important.
When you’re not at work, focus on family and personal time. For me, that’s evenings and weekends, and that’s been true ever since I was an Assistant Professor.
There will be exceptions, crunch times when you have to get something done. Just be sure that crunch time does not become your standard mode. A couple of evenings and maybe a weekend a semester is a reasonable target.
Learn the flow of the year. When our boys were young, and my spouse would go to sea for months at a time, I knew that our kids would be my priority, so I did not stress myself out about my lack of productivity then. Likewise, I would go away with my boys for a week or two every summer, and that was in addition to the family vacation. During all those times, having fun with my family was my priority. I didn’t take work, and I set a vacation-reply on my email, and I stuck to it. All those things could wait until I got back.
Now, when she came home from sea, or I’d come back from those trips, that became my opportunity to focus on my research. Likewise, I learned that some parts of the semester are just packed with teaching, meetings, and so many other obligations. I learned to accept that I wouldn’t get much research done then. But I also learned to be ruthless about my time when I needed to focus on research. If I’m in the field, the other things get turned off. The point is, although we like to think about a daily balance, or a weekly balance, sometimes the balance is achieved over longer time frames.
This means a couple of things. First, learn to say no. For example, you should be review papers and grant proposals, but you don’t have to accept every request. I do about one a month, which more than offsets my load on the system.
Second, don’t accept a task unless you have a clear short-term vision of when it can be done. For example, I accept review requests only if I have a block of time in the next week where I can finish it.
For research, teaching, and service, keep your commitments limited. Remember, time is limited: everything you say yes to means that you’re saying no to something else, and you must be able to identify what you’re giving up. You cannot simply pack more obligations into the same time frame without doing a poor job of something else.
New things often seem more exciting than old things. Resist that urge. Finish that manuscript before diving into a new project. The longer things sit, the harder they are to finish.
A focus on finishing, combined with not overloading your commitments will help you to avoid that long to-do list. Those long lists are a morale-killer, and bad morale will cause your productivity to suffer.
Avoid that perfectionist urge. Do a good job, but don’t let a task grow beyond what it needs. For example, I handle a manuscript review, a thesis edit, or a dissertation-chapter edit in one day. Setting time limits like this will help you stay focused on the main issues and not minutiae.
Studies have shown that task switching is a killer for productivity, so avoid it.
If you have many short tasks to tackle, like meetings (especially meetings), do your best to handle them in one day or in a portion of a day. For example, I try to schedule all my weekly meetings with my students on one day, usually a day that I’m teaching.
The goal is to keep a portion of every week open, a couple of days if possible, for mind-intensive work where continuity matters. Often, you’ll use these uncommitted periods for doing research. Some weeks you will use them to write a review. If you can’t block out whole days, try to at least free up entire mornings or entire afternoons.
Although I didn’t implement everything he suggests (the 31 folders and the tickler file, for example), much of what he describes is now part of my routine. Reading it helped me make some important changes to how I work.
I hope these things help.