May 2010
Work-life Balance Is Good For Your Health
Working more than 40 hours a week seems normal today - at least in the US. The attorneys I meet tell me they constantly work into the night and over weekends. Blackberries and other smart phones enable clients and other attorneys to contact them at any time and they do. It has become an accepted way of life here. Is it healthy?
The latest research shows that working too many hours is not good for your health. The research, published online in the European Heart Journal, found that, compared with people who did not work overtime, people who worked ten or more hours a day had a 60 percent higher risk of heart-related problems such as death due to heart disease, nonfatal heart attacks and angina.
What happens to finding the balance between work and leisure when people work over 60 plus hours a week? I attended a Women's Bar Association meeting in which work-life balance was the topic of the discussion. For the mothers present at the meeting working and having other family responsibilities is an important and difficult issue.
No one there considered health issues (except maybe how to go to pediatrician appointments during the day). They were merely trying to find the balance that allowed them to care for the family and practice law. It is not easy. For some working part time is an answer. For others setting firm boundaries is another.
One woman told of picking up her child at daycare at 5:30pm and having her phone ring just as they were walking home. She answered the phone and told the attorney at the other end that she was with her child so she could not talk but that she would call the attorney back in the morning. That is a firm boundary.
Others might choose to work and care for the child at the same time. Having half your attention on the work and half on the child is not a very satisfactory solution. Depending on what is going on with each, your work or your child might be in jeopardy.
There are no simple solutions to this. If you think I have the answer, guess again. In order to bill the required number of hours, attorneys need to work those long hours. Marketing the practice takes time too. It is hard to get everything into 40 hours. So 40 hours of work a week becomes the new "part time".
One suggestion I make to my clients is to have a planning session every week preferably on Friday afternoon. Look at what deadlines are ahead for you and decide what you need to do during the next week. Make a "to do" and then fill in the items on your list in the open times on your calendar.
This may not make your number of hours fewer but if you make and follow a schedule you will be more efficient. Consistently doing this will make you more conscious of how long something will take you so you can give clients a more realistic assessment of when the work will be done the next time. You will also become aware of how much time you can waste between activities when you do not have a schedule. All of that can help to make your hours more reasonable. Keeping your work hours in check will contribute to a healthier life and maybe to achieving that elusive work-life balance.
Take Action
- What does work-life balance look like for you? To achieve your desired "balance" when would you have to leave work?
- Make a schedule for next week using the time you would like to leave work as the end time of your day.
- Assess how scheduling worked for you at the end of the first week. What must you do to improve your scheduling?
- Schedule the next week using what you have learned.