A little while ago I was asked by C-DEBI to give a webinar* for their Professional Development Series on work-life balance. Now, I can’t claim to have any particular insight into that subject, but while I was preparing for it, I did stumble on an idea that has stuck with me: the idea of ‘work-life balance’ is totally the wrong frame for how to think about allocating our time between research and non-research stuff.
The reason for this is that our work is part of our lives. Why do I do science for a living? For me, and for most of us I suspect, there are two reasons:
- Science can be thrilling, and since I was a kid I’ve wanted to make discoveries about the world, and
- I need to pay the rent.
I really try hard to keep those reasons in mind when I’m deciding what time to go home, when to spend a day with my kids vs. working, etc. When I do, it makes my analysis simpler: I work when a.) I need to, to pay the rent, or b.) I want to, becuase it is fun. As a practical matter, that means that I’m generally at work from when I drop my kids off at school at about 8 am until about 5 pm on weekdays. I try hard to be present for my family on weekday evenings before bedtime and most of the day on weekends. I often work for an hour or two between the kids’ bedtime and mine, and I might work some more on the weekends, depending on what is going on for my family and how pressing my work deadlines are.
That’s a pretty typical schedule for an academic in my position, I think, so my analytical frame doesn’t get me to anywhere unusual in terms of my time allocation. It does, however, free me to feel great about the decision not to work when I could be working, because I recognize that the purpose of my work is to support my life, rather than the other way around. But sometimes I choose to work extra, either because my science is just too exciting not to, or because I feel like I really need to bust my butt in order to keep my job. Again, that’s nothing radical, but it serves as a powerful antidote to the pervasive notion in science that we could always be doing more to push our science (and our career) further.
Dr. Natasha Dowey recently asked an insightful question about how to lead a fulfilling life without allowing one’s research to ‘suffer’:
I think just about all of us have this question in the back of our minds a lot of the time. But this question contains a category error: research can’t suffer. It isn’t sentient. It doesn’t get sad if it doesn’t get done. People suffer, and we can certainly suffer if we don’t get enough research out to keep the job that we want, but when we think about allocating our time in terms of benefit to ourselves and the people we care about, it becomes a lot easier to decide how much our our finite time on Earth to spend at work.
- The webinar is archived here, for those who are super-interested in more of my thoughts on the subject.
