BETTER FAMILIES
by
Jomo Phillips MSSW-MFT (Clinical Fellow AAMFT)
Couple & Family Therapist/Clinical Social Worker
An organisation recently asked me to present at an online forum for entrepreneurs in the service industry. The organisers requested that I focus on mental health, particularly “balancing work and life,” given the current challenges that many people are experiencing during the pandemic, doing work and being home in the same spaces.
The concept of work-life balance has been around for almost 40 years. The term itself has come to be associated with various things, including the need for more leisure opportunities, family time, and self-care, yet the word oversimplifies our human experience. This oversimplification is because the idea of work-life balance puts an artificial barrier between work and life. As I told the audience, it makes us think that work is not part of life and vice versa, when, in reality, we can do and often do both things simultaneously. Work-life balance also incorrectly implies that one of those activities has to win out, so for example, life would lose out while we are working.
There are many opportunities to “integrate work and life” and create synergies between both of these critical activities. When I consulted with clients who have been incredibly stressed about not balancing their work and family lives, we not only discussed the impossibility of balancing both, but we looked for opportunities to pivot between work and life tasks. Some clients have been discovering and acknowledging pivot moments, like spending times in the morning eating breakfast with their children before venturing off to work for a few hours while their children do online school; then to ensure that they eat dinner with their children, help with homework, and then get a couple of hours to respond to work tasks before going to bed.
Looking for opportunities to pivot enhances work-life integration. Still, there are other things that people can do to improve this process, including scheduling time, coordinating with other family members and significant others, and creating boundaries. Time management is critical in integrating life and work. I have been recently encouraging people to do time-audits, spending a day or two logging all the activities they do.
On more than one occasion, clients have been surprised at how often they do non-essential tasks like checking their WhatsApp messages, spending time on email, or even idling on Instagram. These times add up and prevent people from doing more meaningful work or life tasks. After clients have audited their time, they developed schedules that include work and life tasks and give them some flexibility or wiggle room to address urgent things that they might not have scheduled. Having conversations with family members and significant others is also essential in integrating work and life.
I know that living during the pandemic has put a disproportionate amount of work on women. This increase in workload is because of gendered expectations. Women are often expected to continue to do professional work while doing many domestic tasks at home; a reality only intensified because many of them are also doing professional work from home. For some of my female clients, many of whom felt particularly stressed during the pandemic, talking to spouses about ways to contribute to and share domestic tasks has been particularly helpful. It has also been valuable to involve and encourage children to be more responsible at home.
Finally, to integrate work and life, many people have been finding it particularly useful to create boundaries; this includes boundaries around both work and life tasks. I recently chuckled reading a colleague’s automated email response, which had that he was not responding to emails after 5 p.m. or on the weekends. His automated response was a clear establishment of a boundary, and communicating it to colleagues made it particularly powerful. Boundaries can include when to turn off our work cell phones and when our children should speak to us during the workday. The critical consideration is that these boundaries help set us up for some success in both work and life spheres.
If we are thoughtful and engage in planning, there are many opportunities to “integrate work and life” and create synergies between both of these critical activities. Making pivots, scheduling time, coordinating with other family members and significant others, and creating boundaries create space for important things for us and, more importantly, our own physical and emotional health.
