Work-Life Balance: Make It Happen

The idea of work-life balance sounds good. Putting in a good day’s work, then going home to spend quality time with the kids, before an intimate late night coffee and chat with your husband. Okay, you can stop laughing now. Here’s how you can turn that fantasy into reality — if you are willing to try.

Rita Kassim (not her real name) is 43 and the managing director of a human resource company that places high-level executives in high-level jobs. “Basically I’m the MD that other MDs come to to get the right man or woman,” she explains.

It’s an understatement to say her job is stressful. Rita gets to work at 7.30am, where she has to answer emails and sometimes calls from clients across the world. The rest of her day is spent managing her team and combing databases, and meeting clients to ascertain their human resource needs.

If the position is a senior one in a multi-national company, she has to personally meet these candidates to do the first cut of interviews. Most candidates work full time and so, can only meet after work hours, from 6.30pm onwards.

“Out of five days in the week, I get home round midnight four days,” she says. Her children, who are 15 and 13, no longer call her during the week. “They know I’m the weekend mum, so there’s no point wasting their free talktime on me!”

As for her husband, “He works till 8, 9pm every night. We do try to stay up till 1am just catching up and listening to one another’s stories, but often, we just shower, brush our teeth and go to bed!”

Rita doesn’t believe there is such a thing as work-life balance. “It’s more weekday-weekend balance,” she says. On weekends, she tries not to bring her Blackberry with her. “I have a dual line so I carry my basic Nokia on weekends so I don’t hear the beeps and bings of my Blackberry emails and instant messages.” But she laments, “But as it turns out, my whole weekend is spent running errands, paying bills, getting house repairs done because I had no time to do it during the week! To me that’s not really quality time with my family.”

If one has a job like Rita’s, it’s seems insurmountable to try and find time during the week to get anything done. But sometimes, when we want something bad enough, we’ll find a way to get it.

Nanz Inc suggested these three simple actions to Rita, and got her to try them out for two weeks:

1. Plan one lunch date with your husband per week. Set aside one hour once a week, where you cancel everything else, end meetings early or start them later, just so you can have lunch with your husband.

2. Plan a Saturday or Sunday morning activity with your children that is decided by your children. If your kids are having tuition or enrichment classes during the weekends, it’s time to seriously rethink if these enrichment classes are going to forge a bond between you and your child in the future. Reschedule, or if they are supplementary and do not affect your child’s final exams in a large way, cut them out.

3. Make no excuses. Make your plan and stick to it come hell or high water.

We caught up with Rita after her two-week trial.

“It was really an eye-opener, and not a pleasant one!” she said. “I discovered that I have a nasty habit of holding meetings during lunch, which is really bad for everybody. Not only me, but my staff need a break just to go out, get some fresh air and come back refreshed to work through the afternoon.”

The first week, Rita found herself forced to cancel a work-lunch meeting so that she could drive to her husband’s office to meet him for lunch. “I have to say that was a really nice experience. We managed to try out a new lunch place that I had been hearing so much about, and the second week he surprised me with flowers,” she giggled.

Clearing Saturday mornings to have meaningful time with her teens proved much tougher. “I think they are at that age where they don’t want to hang out with Mummy,” she sighs. The first Saturday was a big flop — the kids couldn’t think of a single activity they wanted to do with their mother. So the second week, Rita decided to take charge. “I booked tickets online the night before, and we went to watch a movie on Saturday morning, after which we went to have lunch at Carl’s Jr — which I hate but they love. It was nice to talk to my kids about nothing — feels like I haven’t done that since they were five!”

Work-life balance doesn’t mean equal parts “work” and “the rest of your life”. But it does mean making the “life” moments count. Prioritizing and creating space for things to happen are just two of the methods women can use to ensure greater balance.

Rita plans to continue these two little “escapades” for at least six months. “I have always given myself excuses to put work before my husband and kids. Now work’s going to have to take a backseat for a couple of hours a week. No more excuses.”

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