Maybe it’s me: How your own expectations can mess up work-life harmony
Hi friends!
I’m back from Greece! It seems fitting that after a two-week vacation, I’m picking back up on the topic of work-life harmony. It seems like it’s one of those topics that will always be relevant: Work-life harmony comes up over and over again when I work with teams. And of course, it makes sense. I think we can all relate to the tension we feel between work and life. No matter how much we love our work, we can’t help but feel like it’s taking us away from our lives—and vise-versa.
But as work evolves and leaders and organizations start to offer more flexibility, there’s an important piece of the puzzle to consider: How much do we contribute to our own work/life tension? Could we be part of the problem . . . and in that case, the solution?
This very thing came up during some recent work I did with a team. We were talking about burnout, and the team wanted to figure out how to have better work-life harmony. Someone mentioned being at a restaurant with their family, and though they knew they didn’t need to check their work email when they were away from the office, they did it anyway. And all of a sudden, instead of being present with their family, they were thinking about an email they needed to reply to. They knew this wasn’t a sustainable way to live, and they wanted advice on how to get better about separating work from life.
We began with some exploration to try to pinpoint why they felt that they didn’t have the work-life harmony they really wanted. We started with the culture. Usually, where there’s burnout, there’s an “always-on” culture: The leaders at the top send emails at all hours, never take time off, have extremely high expectations for their team’s output, etc. Interestingly, with this team, that wasn’t the case at all. Their organization’s leadership actually promotes and encourages work-life harmony. They discourage overwork and want their people to take time to recharge and spend time with their families—and it's not just lip service. Their leaders’ actions truly show that this matters to them. For example, the organization’s former CEO once said that the thing she was most proud of in her career was that she never missed a single one of her kids’ soccer matches or baseball games. She didn’t point to stats about the company or personal accomplishments; the thing she was most proud of was taking time away from work to focus on her kids.
So then, the focus of our conversation turned inward. If this is the example this team gets from leadership, why are they reaching burnout? What is keeping the tension between work and life alive? We quickly realized that it wasn’t the organization . . . it was the team’s own expectations for themselves that were getting in the way.
We started a conversation about why that might be. One of the first things that came up was identity: So many people in the room identified really strongly with their work. They have a very strong work ethic, and they consider work to be a huge and important part of their life that they really enjoy. They talked about how, when your work is so important to you, your reputation is also really important, and that’s how ego can creep in. Maybe you get used to being the go-to person for putting out fires, solving problems, or giving advice, and you start to feel like you need to be the one to do those things. You take pride in answering emails quickly or always being available, and you start to think that if you don’t do that, you will jeopardize your reputation—and, therefore, your identity. I can certainly relate to all of those feelings.
But the thing is that no one is asking you to refresh your inbox every five minutes or be the only one to solve the team’s problems. For this team, they realized they were putting those expectations on themselves, just like I know I have done in my own journey. I have put myself on a pedestal and made myself think that the team couldn’t survive without me.
I’ve found that when I’m at my most overwhelmed, it’s rarely because of what someone else expects of me; it's because I’m not meeting my own expectations. When I find myself working late into the evening or on the weekends, I have to check in with myself and ask, “Do I really need to be doing this right now? Or can it wait?” And almost always, it can wait. I’ve learned that I have to be the one to give myself permission to unplug. I have to be the one to set more realistic expectations for myself.
In the conversation with this team, we came up with ways they could each own their part of the equation. I loved what they came up with, and I want to share their “ahas” with you in case you find them helpful, too:
Create physical boundaries. One person shared that they have separate phones for their work and personal lives, and it’s been a game-changer for them. When they get home from work, they turn off their work phone and they move to their personal phone. Their personal phone doesn’t have email or anything work-related connected to it, so it allows them to hold a physical boundary between work and life—especially on the weekends—and helps them to be really present with their family.
Add executing time to your calendar. Another idea was blocking out time to get things done on your calendar. This is something I do as well: I create time for work and personal things on my calendar to make sure I prioritize them equally. It helps to actually block out that time instead of just hoping you’ll have room in your schedule or executing your to-dos. If you don’t intentionally create time to get things done, you can let other things get in the way, and that’s how you end up working at night and on the weekends. During the team session, we decided to give everyone time to look at their calendar for the next week and block out some executing time. They did it right then and there, and many people remarked on how good it felt.
Challenge meetings. You know what frees up a ton of time in a calendar? Canceling meetings! On this team, several people felt like they were going to meetings that weren't effective or that they didn't really need to be in. But for so long, they’d just gone through the motions and never stopped to think about whether they should speak up. One person shared about a time when they spoke up about a meeting that they felt wasn't effective and actually didn't even need to happen. They thought it wasn’t a good use of anyone’s time. And everyone else agreed! It was a relief to everyone to get that time back. We also talked about how it’s not always possible to totally get rid of a meeting, of course, but that doesn’t mean you have to sit through the whole thing. Maybe you can speak up about being there for only the part of the meeting that’s applicable to you. I thought it was really cool that they started to challenge how they could create space with the time that they already have on their calendar.
Set boundaries that honor your capacity. At the heart of most work/life tension is one simple fact: We’re not great at honoring our actual capacity. But we’re really good at honoring the capacity of the perfect version of ourselves that lives in our heads! This team and I framed it this way: When you say yes to something, you’re saying no to something else. An example that came up in the room was about people who want to come into your office (or your Zoom room) and chat when you’re trying to get things done. If you say yes to chatting with them, you might be saying no to going home on time or keeping evenings and weekends work-free. So in the moment, it’s important to set a boundary that honors your capacity. You could say, “Hey, I really want to talk to you and this topic is really important to me. Instead of chatting now, could we put a time on my calendar to have this conversation so we can really dive into it?” It can also look like challenging arbitrary deadlines. So often, we stick to deadlines that we chose without much thought, and we get stressed out when we realize they’re unrealistic. Instead of working overtime to hit the deadline, you could say, “I can't get that to you by this day, but I can get it to you by this day.” If your main concern is being helpful to someone else, remember that you can help them while also honoring your capacity.
Add catchup days to your PTO. On this team, a lot of people struggled with disconnecting from work while on vacation because they felt like their work just piled up while they were gone. They didn’t want to feel behind when they got back, so they shared that that’s why they actually prefer to work on vacation. But then it’s not a vacation, is it? It also sends the wrong message to the rest of their team. So instead of working while you’re on leave, we talked about adding a few days on the back end of your vacation where you’re still off, but you’re focusing only on catching up. You don't go into the office and you don't schedule meetings, but you catch up on emails or tasks or anything else you may have missed while you were away. That way, you can truly disconnect on your vacation knowing that you have that time when you get back to catch up instead of coming straight back from vacation and right into tons of meetings, which can be overwhelming.
I loved my conversation with this team, and I loved the ideas that came out of our session. I hope you find them helpful, too! I thought it was so interesting that we identified it wasn't actually the organization's part of the equation that we needed to focus on; it was the individual’s.
What I hope you’ll take from this post is that we have to give ourselves permission to change our expectations of ourselves. It’s something we have to work at every day. If this is a struggle for you, I see you—it's a struggle for me, too! Give yourself permission to have the work-life harmony that you really want. We’ve got this!
Big hugs,
