Boundaries, Priorities, and Finding Work-Life Balance
Various Contributors
Harvard Business Review Press (May 2024)
“Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving.” Albert Einstein
This is one of the volumes in the HBR Work Smart Series, offering insights from cutting-edge thinkers who share their thoughts about how to accelerate your personal growth and professional development.
This series features the topics that matter most to those now preparing for or are early in their business career, topics “including being yourself at work, collaborating with (sometimes difficult) colleagues and bosses, managing your mental health, and weighing major job decisions. Each title includes chapter recaps as well as links to video, The HBR Work Smart Series books are your practical guides to stepping into your professional life and moving forward with confidence.”
According to the Series editors, “We often equate our productivity with the number of hours we spend working. But do we really need to work endlessly, through weekends and during vacations, to be seen as stars? To find a healthy balance between our personal and professional lives, we need to make space for ourselves, define what we value most, and set goals that take those values into full account.”
I presume to add that most of the material in these books will also be of substantial value to supervisors who have direct reports entrusted to their care.
The 20 articles were originally published in HBR and if all were purchased separately as reprints, the total cost would be at least $240. Amazon now sells a paperbound volume for only $22. That’s not a bargain; that’s a steal.
Russell Glass wrote a superb Introduction to Boundaries, Priorities, and Finding Work-Life Balance. Here’s a brief excerpt:
“This book provides a tremendous resource for anyone regardless of career stage, but particularly for those just starting out [as well as for those committed to strengthening a workplace culture]. The pages that follow are filled with advice from world-renowned clinicians, corporate leaders, researchers, and experts, many of whom have dedicated their careers to improving workplace culture. Their guidance ranges from easy-to-implement strategies to reflection-oriented questions to help unearth answers from within. This is a guide that you can turn back to time and time again to learn how to set better boundaries between work and life [elsewhere], prioritize mental and physical health, battle burnout, and tackle your to-do lists in sustainable yet productive ways.”
These are among the articles of greatest interest and value to me.
o “Work-Life Balance Is a Cycle. Not an Achievement,” Ioana Lupu and Mayra Ruiz-Castro (Pages 3-10)
o “A Guide to Better Boundaries: Define what you need to feel secure and healthy,” Joe Sanok (31-39)
o “Battle Burnout with This Acronym: E.M.P.O.W.E.R. Decisions,” Carson Tate (69-76)
o “Stop Trying to Manage Your Time: Protect your energy,” Amantha Imber (99-105)
o “There Is No “Right” Way to Do Self-Care Change: Change your mindset,” Alyssa F. Westring (143-147)
Once you set or revise your goals, you will be well-prepared to achieve them by effectively applying the relevant knowledge and wisdom that are provided in this book. However, you will also need help from associates and probably some luck such as “being in the right place at the right time.” You also need to know when an opportunity is “knocking on your door,” and be prepared to take full advantage of it. (Sometimers it whispers rather than knocks.) You can also benefit from having role models. There is a great deal of value to learn from others’ successes and, especially from their [begin italics] failures [end italics]. However, to repeat, your success (however defined) ultimately depends on you.
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Here are two other suggestions while reading Boundaries, Priorities, and Finding Work-Life Balance : First, highlight key passages. Also, perhaps in a lined notebook kept near-at- hand, record your comments, questions, action steps (preferably with deadlines), page references, and lessons you have learned as well as your responses to key points posed within the narrative. Also record your responses to specific or major issues or questions addressed, especially at the conclusion of chapters.
These two simple tactics — highlighting and documenting — will facilitate, indeed expedite frequent reviews of key material later.