![]() ![]() “The fear is you’ll be overlooked by your overworking bosses and seen as a threat by everyone else.” Balancing work and life “is such an act of subversion, of resistance, that it’s really difficult for individuals to do,” Schulte said. This fruitless cycle suggests that work-life balance is not independently achievable for most overworked people, if not outright impossible. Check emails during the kids’ swim meet, they say, or pick up a hobby to “take your mind off work”-and take up even more time you don’t have.īusy workers have been trying and failing at these types of hacks for decades. ![]() ![]() The solution from career gurus has historically been to try to squeeze both work and life into the overpacked Tupperware that is your day. Women are often the default chore-doers and child-tenders, even in relationships that strive for egalitarianism. American workers-especially those in white-collar professions-are working longer hours. The reasons behind this “madness,” as Schulte put it, are familiar, and they’re not specific to journalism. I once made my boyfriend pay me for the hours I spent booking flights and hotels for our vacation. Constant pressure in my profession has made me go to great lengths to minimize how much labor I perform outside of work. On a recent cross-country trip to see my parents, I spent a day doing my work expenses. I’ve timed calls from PR people to coincide with my commute home, since that’s the only “free” time I had to talk. My career as a journalist similarly requires odd hours. When I read Schulte’s book, I found myself nodding along vigorously. I felt like I was falling apart at the seams.” At home, I felt like I couldn’t be the kind of mother that I thought I should be. I always felt behind, that I wasn’t doing enough. “It was madness,” Schulte, who is now the director of the Better Life Lab at New America, told me recently. When she described her time troubles to a fellow reporter, the reporter said, “I don’t know how you single mothers do it.” Schulte has a husband. At night, she would wake in a panic thinking of all the stuff she didn’t get done. At work, she would get started on an article only to have to take a break to call her kids’ school. “I have held what I hope were professional-sounding interviews sitting on the floor in the hall outside my kids’ dentist’s office,” Schulte writes. Her unforgiving schedule had no free time and left her constantly torn between her family and professional life. In 2014, when she wrote Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time, a book about the hunt for work-life balance, Schulte was a reporter for The Washington Post and a mother of two young children. Brigid Schulte has baked Valentine’s Day cupcakes until 2 a.m. ![]()
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