Work-Life Balance – Is There Really Such a Thing?

Work-life balance is a type of a mystery similar to the loch de ness monster.
Work-life balance is a type of a mystery similar to the loch de ness monster.
Work-life balance is a type of a mystery similar to the loch de ness monster.
It’s elusive and you will always wonder if such a thing actually exists. Recently, I read a piece that said top executive women actually call it “the merge”. Now a merge is a term borrowed from the business world, and the connotation of it implies that just like when two companies merge, some parts benefit and some parts suffer. More recently, I heard another term for it – work-life harmony – now that sounds better and have a positive connotation, don’t you think? Interestingly, a woman used the merge analogy, while a man used the “harmony” one– a coincidence? I’ll leave it to you to interpret…
Speaking of work-life harmony, I was planning to write this post for the past 2 weeks, 1 month, 3 months or so…
Work-life balance is an issue that is on everyone’s mind, but mostly women. It always comes up in career panels and on career symposiums days and thus I thought it’s worth a blog post. You may wonder what qualifies me to write this post? Well, because when I was in grad school, I did an unspeakable thing!!! Seriously!
I had a baby. Actually I had 1.66 babies when I was in in grads school, and 0.33 baby in my post-doc. If the math doesn’t make sense – I had my son during my 3rd year in grad school and I defended my thesis pregnant with my daughter, who was born 3 months after I started my post-doc fellowship. I also have an extremely supportive husband that travels a lot for work, which means I mastered my single-mom mode skills, thus I have my fair share of experience juggling life science and motherhood.
Becoming a parent while in graduate school forced me to be super-organized and there was no time for procrastination. I had (and still have) a daily deadline and I had to do my stuff and get it done. Yes, it meant that occasionally I had to prioritize finishing my experiments over attending a seminar or engaging in a discussion with my peers. You just have to make it work.
Now there’s one thing I’d really like to clarify. I’m often asked whether I decided to leave the bench because I had a family – the answer is NO. I left it because I wasn’t passionate about it anymore. However, it did bother me that being a researcher doesn’t “let you go”, it was hard for me to disconnect from work: I always kept thinking on the experiments I should do and the papers I should read. I thought that leaving the bench would free me from these thoughts. As it happens, this just has to be my personality, it doesn’t matter what I do. I just tend to think of the stuff I should do, regardless if it’s purifying T cells or updating the website.Granted, most of my job,as a program manager, involves things that are mostly in my control, and while it’s not my cells dying when I was about to do a key experiment, life happens, for example, if my child is sick (ah…the wonders of the developing immune system) it won’t stress me out as much, as it’s easier (in most cases) moving a meeting, then telling your cells you’ve been growing for the past two weeks to wait couple more days.
However, work-life balance is not just about people that have kids, it’s about maintaining a healthy balance between work and personal life; whether it’s going to the gym, singing on a choir, or just being social. At the end of the day it is about setting your priorities straight, and yes, I know it’s easier said than done, but I think we all should try and do a better job at really trying to disconnect from work (and/ or smart phones) and be fully presence at whatever it is we are doing at the moment.
So whether you already have a family or you’re considering starting one, you should know that yes, indeed, it’s hard but it’s doable. Life happens and you just need to make sure your priorities are set accordingly. Think of work-life balance as a seesaw: you can either be up or down. And if you embrace the fact that you can’t be up on both sides all the time, it will help you get it right when you need to choose. With all honesty, it’s a constant struggle, there are some times I feel I’m a bad parent and some days that I feel I need to work more. But rest assures – you can have it all, just not necessarily at the same time.