Stop multitasking. Budget your time. Put down your phone.
From juggling your family’s personal commitments to urgent work projects, the start of a new academic year can bring seasonal overwhelm. But it can also offer an opportunity to reflect: How to do things better, achieve more balance, and set more meaningful priorities at work and at home.
As we begin the last quarter of 2024, Harvard Business School faculty experts provide research-based methods to deepen the quality of both working and personal lives. Their recommendations range from treating this season like New Year’s to setting aside time to focus that can help restore work-life balance.
Joseph Fuller: Make time for ‘deep work’ at the office and home
People have struggled to balance the demands of work and their personal lives since the emergence of organized human activity. And humans have likely been frustrated with their inability to do so for just as long. How can someone overcome that cultural inheritance?
It starts with managing one’s time at work. Technology allows work to encroach relentlessly on employees’ personal lives. If a person fails to put boundaries around their work commitments, balance remains an ambition.
“Hubris and the ubiquity of devices configured to interrupt us make focused work a near impossibility for many.”
Time management principles at work are well understood, just terribly hard to implement. Human beings are singularly badly equipped to multitask. But hubris and the ubiquity of devices configured to interrupt us make focused work a near impossibility for many. That inflicts a huge time penalty on workers, since start-stop-restart cycles are inefficient.
Urgent and important things naturally draw employees’ attention. Yet people are prone to respond to anything appearing urgent, even if it’s unimportant. Similarly, they’re inclined to defer important tasks, particularly if they are difficult and require the type of undivided attention that requires “deep work.”
This misallocation of time is the root cause of work-life imbalance. Interrupted work is inefficient work. So, how to change it?
Designate distraction-free time for ‘deep work’
The first rule is to assign generous periods of time to important tasks exclusively, isolated from distraction (welcome or not). Workers capable of performing what Georgetown Professor Cal Newport describes as “deep work” will be far more productive, escaping the trap of all-consuming work.
The second rule is to focus on the right thing. Embrace a framework for allocating your efforts. US President (and legendary General) Dwight D. Eisenhower is credited with one method: distinguish tasks by their importance (high to low) and their urgency (pressing to deferrable).
Learning and living by two such seemingly straightforward principles is difficult. One must be willing to say no to colleagues and friends, overcome procrastination, engage in hard tasks, and subdue the temptation to succumb to omnipresent distractions.
Try the same method in your personal life
Fortunately, the costs can be amortized by developing such habits in one’s personal life. The same bedrock postulates apply: pay “deep attention” to friends and family. And be judicious in allocating time while performing all the uncompensated work required to run one’s affairs and household.
Achieving work-life balance is not, therefore, a matter of containing how much one world intrudes on the other. It’s a matter of developing the discipline to apply a few simple principles and to implement them in the workplace and home.
Joseph Fuller is a Professor of Management Practice and co-leads the Managing the Future of Work initiative at HBS.
Christina Wallace: Use zero-based budgeting to fight burnout
Most people think of January 1 as the start to the new year, yet get frustrated when they don’t have the time to rebalance their portfolio life for the year ahead.
It’s not their fault: holiday season mayhem is often at odds with the clean start many desire when the calendar changes over. It’s easy to throw up your hands and give in to routine once the first few weeks of the year speed by, even if you know you need to make a change.
“When the calendar doesn’t line up with the natural cadence of your life, you may need to operate on a “fiscal year” instead.”
But there’s good news: time is a construct. When the calendar doesn’t line up with the natural cadence of your life, you may need to operate on a “fiscal year” instead.
For example, I long thought of September as the start of my year (even before I joined the HBS faculty) because many of the commitments in my portfolio were anchored to the academic calendar. Whether it was community chamber orchestras or semi-professional choirs, my musical pursuits always kicked off after Labor Day.
Similarly, the fitness studios I frequented often adjusted the class schedules twice a year—almost like two “semesters.” Likewise, the enrichment activities my kids decided to participate in reset each fall. Even the Broadway plays and musicals I produced revolved around the industry award season, culminating with the Tony Awards in June.
‘Clean slate’ September (or just say no to overbooking)
Rather than wait until January, my family makes it a point to clear out the “clutter” in our schedules at the end of each summer and start a fresh year as the New England air turns crisp.
Taking inspiration from zero-based budgeting, we start with a clean slate and intentionally select activities, projects, and commitments rather than using the previous year as the default.
Then, before we lock everything in, we take a step back and ask if we’ve left enough room for life to happen. That is, are we saying “no” to enough things to ensure we have slack in the system? After all, the patterns of burnout are often predictable, and planned downtime is cheaper than unplanned downtime.
Christina Wallace is a senior lecturer in the Entrepreneurial Management Unit at HBS.
Kathleen McGinn: Communicate, reframe, and align expectations with your partner
Want to be grateful for your partner when it comes to household tasks and management? Communicate, reframe, and align your expectations. Women and men in mixed-gender couples generally expect to share responsibility for physical domestic tasks, albeit to different extents, our recent research suggests.
“Gratitude and resentment offer important clues about what men and women expect of each other when it comes to maintaining a home and raising children.”
But when it comes to cognitive labor, the work of planning, managing, and organizing required to run a household, men and women differ. Few men expected to “co-manage” their home, our research finds, but women’s views on whether their partner should share in cognitive labor were more diverse. We interviewed mothers and fathers―members of mixed-gender couples living in dual-income households with children at home―several times over two years. The interviews revealed sources of gratitude and resentment within households and helped us identify expectations underlying such emotions.
Gratitude and resentment offer important clues about what men and women expect of each other when it comes to maintaining a home and raising children. Which spousal actions register as “extra” and inspire gratitude? Which register as “not enough” and inspire resentment?
We examined these emotions and the underlying expectations they reflected in relation to the division of housework and childcare. Our work sheds new light on familiar questions related to gender ideology, household dynamics, and social change. Sources of gratitude and resentment varied considerably across and within genders.
Women: grateful for physical help; resentful for lack of cognitive help
Among women, the most common source of labor-related gratitude was their partner’s contributions to the physical tasks of housekeeping and parenting, though a smaller number expressed gratitude for men’s proactive initiative on household matters.
Women’s resentment sometimes arose from their partners’ failure to step up to specific physical tasks, but more often from unmet expectations for shared cognitive labor. They wanted a partner who acted as a co-manager of family life, rather than an assistant waiting for direction, and grew resentful when his approach resembled the latter.
Men: Grateful for domestic labor, resentful of ‘guessing’ what’s needed
Men, like women, expressed gratitude for their partner’s unpaid domestic labor.
But their reasoning exposed gendered expectations: Most of the men we interviewed said they were grateful because women’s housework and parenting preserved men’s time and energy for paid labor; less frequently, men expressed gratitude for their partners lightening a shared domestic load. Men’s resentment most often centered on the quantity or quality of labor their partner expected of them. They also resented “having to guess” about those expectations, which they attributed to their partner’s lack of communication.
Repeated interviews with both members of couples revealed two avenues for increasing gratitude and reducing resentment. Gratitude within couples increased when men developed greater attunement to their partners’ circumstances and expectations for housework, and when women began more explicitly delegating cognitive and physical tasks.
Couples striving to enhance gratitude and reduce resentment in their relationships should articulate and align their expectations of one another, particularly when it comes to responsibility for household management, our findings suggest.
Kathleen McGinn is the the Cahners-Rabb Professor of Business Administration at HBS. McGinn is studying these topics as part of ongoing research with Allison Daminger, assistant professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison; Alexandra Feldberg, assistant professor at HBS; HBS doctoral student Amanda Nerenberg; and Rachel Drapper, founder of Fairshare.
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