Juggling is the name of the game these days. One big ball might be your job, another could be parenthood, and maybe the third is a passion project like writing a novel or volunteering. There are probably other balls in the air too, such as the needs of your friends, plants or pets. And perhaps everything gets a whole lot more challenging — like hopping on a unicycle mid-juggle — when something unexpected happens, such as financial burdens, caring for your elderly parents or a global pandemic. For members of our L&S community, this balancing act is a topic of both personal and professional interest. To get some insight around this buzzy conversation, we asked alumni, researchers and advisors how they’ve overcome burnout, counseled students as they start their careers, challenged societal norms and researched strategies for better well-being.
The Job Hunt
For Megan Aley (’12) career conversations are a part of her day-to-day work. As the associate director of Career Advising & Communities and as the career and internship specialist for Communications, Entertainment & the Arts for SuccessWorks, she works directly with L&S students and recent graduates to help them navigate the early stages of their career. We sat down with Aley to get tips on how to think about work–life balance when searching for a new job.
How does work–life balance come up in your career advising conversations?
I often find myself trying to help students negotiate that balance of understanding what they want to do in a job, in their career and in the next big phase of their life, and also figuring out how to articulate and balance what they want that job to facilitate for them outside of work.
This is a hot topic. What trends have you noticed lately?
In these creative industries where there’s a lot more bleed between the passionate life pursuit and work — it’s all kind of stitched together — what I’m seeing is students expressing a desire to figure out how to set up those guardrails. I’ve also seen students be quite pragmatic and say, “No, I want to keep my work and my passions separate.”
What’s the best advice you would give to someone career hunting with work–life balance in mind?
There’s no one solution that you’re going to figure out right now. This is an ongoing, changing set of values that you’re constantly balancing and figuring out. What you want right now or in five years might be completely different. And what work–life balance looks like as a 44-year-old is probably going to be different from what it looks like as a 24-year-old.
Changing Minds
All the work in the Center for Healthy Minds revolves around one idea: well-being. Two of the Center’s researchers — Associate Professor Simon Goldberg (PhD’17) and Research Assistant Professor Matthew Hirshberg (MS’14, PhD’17) — are constantly trying to build a better scientific understanding of the mind and create practices that help people achieve well-being. Here are three lessons on work–life balance they’ve learned through research.
You can change your mind.
One of their most exciting findings is that it is possible to shift people’s perceptions of their work environments without their circumstances changing. This discovery came from three studies conducted over the last four years in which researchers looked at different work environments and compared a control group of workers to a group that had been assigned treatment through the Healthy Minds Program app. The treatment included lessons in mindfulness and other styles of meditation. The workers who received the treatment began to perceive their contexts in ways that caused less distress and more well-being. “To some extent, well-being is a skill,” Goldberg says. “There are things that we can do to train our minds that can have a direct impact on how we experience the world, including how we experience our work life.”
Improved work–life balance could potentially lead to better outcomes.
Preliminary data from the Center’s studies in school districts have suggested that improving teacher well-being and reducing teacher distress can improve teacher outcomes. In one study, Hirshberg and colleagues found that well-being training significantly reduced early career attrition from teaching.
There are limitations to this strategy.
Hirshberg says the main critique — and a valid one — of this research is that while well-being training helps people to work better in difficult circumstances, it doesn’t address the broken systems creating the circumstances. “We’re working in a world where many systems are not working well,” he says. “And it wouldn’t be long-term effective to just give workers something that makes them more resilient. You also need to address the larger problems.”
Get the free Healthy Minds Program app at hminnovations.org/meditation-app.
Home Work
When discussing work–life balance, a lot of people focus on the “work” part. But for Jessica Calarco, a professor of sociology, “life” is at the heart of her research — specifically the unpaid labor and responsibilities that statistically fall most often on women. She calls this concept America’s do-it-yourself (DIY) society.
“We tell people that they should be able to manage risks on their own,” she says. “If they just make the right choices — the good choices — they should be able to get ahead in society without needing support from the government.”
For Calarco, there’s an obvious problem with this setup, which she outlines in her book Holding It Together: How Women Became America’s Safety Net. There’s too much risk to go around and plenty of people who cannot care for themselves. Children are a prime example of people who need care, but she also points to people who are sick, are elderly or have severe disabilities.
The system is stacked against us in ways that are going to make this hard in the absence of large-scale social change. And that means we shouldn’t blame ourselves entirely if we are struggling.
“We can only maintain this DIY illusion if someone is doing that work of caring for the people who can’t care for themselves,” Calarco says. “And that work disproportionately gets put on women, who are pushed into filling the gaps that are caused by the holes in our social safety net.”
For her book, she drew on a longitudinal study that followed 250 mothers from pregnancy through three years postpartum, as well as two larger national surveys each with approximately 2,000 parents. Statistically speaking, women spend about twice as much time on unpaid care than men, which is a number that has been consistent for years. Men spend slightly more time on paid work than women, but those numbers have been creeping closer together over time, as women continue to increase their participation in the workforce.
This worries Calarco, especially in the face of the country’s childcare crisis, which makes childcare unaffordable for most families and altogether unavailable for others. She fears that women — especially women who are mothers — are set up to fail and are made to feel like it’s their fault. According to Calarco, mothers in America feel significantly more guilt than those in countries with substantially stronger safety nets. She hopes that when women read her book, it will help lessen that burden.
“The system is stacked against us in ways that are going to make this hard in the absence of large-scale social change,” Calarco says. “And that means we shouldn’t blame ourselves entirely if we are struggling.”
Building Boundaries
I’ve always been ambitious and a hard worker. This was an asset when I was a student at UW–Madison, working multiple jobs, involved in a handful of student organizations and double-majoring in African American Studies and Journalism and Mass Communication. But in the early years after graduation, it translated to working long hours in the office and not having much of a life.
This all changed in 2016 — it had to. I was back in school pursuing my MBA, and at the same time I was supporting my father as his health started to decline. There wasn’t enough time to also work 60 hours a week without burning out. And when #BlackWomenAtWork started trending on Twitter that year too, it opened my eyes to what had been happening my whole career. I was the only Black woman in a lot of the corporations where I worked, and for a long time when I was struggling to move up the ladder while facing microaggressions, I thought I was the one doing something wrong. As the first person in my family to graduate college and have a corporate job, I didn’t have anyone to prepare me for this workplace environment. The stories of other Black women struggling with overworking to prove that they belonged resonated with me and empowered me to make a change.
At first, I just started by pulling back. I didn’t talk to my leaders until they noticed the difference in my hours, and when they did, it was a pretty blunt conversation. The work was still getting done, so all I had to say was “this is the job you hired me for, and these are the hours I was told I am expected to work.” Building this boundary created space for me to pursue my passions outside of the office. I started writing for Your Corporate Black Girl and eventually became a podcast host for Blackness and the Workplace.
I’ve had other jobs since that one, and now I handle setting these boundaries differently. I talk directly to my bosses and communicate my expectations because, at the end of the day, I believe that adults should be able to talk to other adults without feeling afraid. It’s helped me to move up in my career and to facilitate time for me to do other things outside of work, like volunteering for the L&S career center, SuccessWorks, as an alumni manager to support students who are entering the corporate world for the first time. Today, I am a learning and development program manager for Alaska Airlines. I have a hybrid schedule that works for me and a fulfilling life outside of my job.
— Jessica Pharm (’10) as told to Alli Watters
AI, the Assistant?
In a short amount of time, artificial intelligence has wormed its way into the workplace. But how much can AI help manage your workload? And what ethics should you consider when using it? Annette Zimmermann, an assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy, researches the ethics of AI and discusses these questions with students in her classes.
When ChatGPT was released, she remembers hearing how the lives of people who had never put much thought toward AI before were suddenly transformed. Her hairstylist used the tool to respond to appointment requests, a person at her gym used it to come up with workout routines, and her friend at a marketing agency automated 90% of her job, calling the tool “magic.”
Outsourcing part of our job, either to another human or to an AI tool, doesn’t diminish those ethical responsibilities.
She thinks the best examples of AI being used well are when the tool is applied to automate menial tasks and create more time for meaningful and exciting work. How much it can help depends on the job and the person. She does not use the tool to aid her in her research work, although generative AI has proven helpful for parts of her pedagogical practice: Her students use AI to complete a “creative project,” such as training GPT models on different philosophical texts and simulating an ethical debate with their help.
But she cautions against using the tools in ways that are uncritical and superficial. “We all have role-specific ethical responsibilities that are a function of our particular job,” Zimmermann says. “Outsourcing part of our job, either to another human or to an AI tool, doesn’t diminish those ethical responsibilities.”
Now Open 24 Hours
America runs 24-7. Luxuries, like the ability to go to the grocery store at 10 p.m., exist because of an increasing number of jobs with nontraditional hours. These jobs, typically in the service and hospitality industry with lower wages, are of particular interest to Alejandra Ros Pilarz. She’s an associate professor in the Sandra Rosenbaum School of Social Work whose research looks at how work schedules impact a parent’s ability to provide for their family and support their children’s development.
Factors that weigh into her research on jobs with nontraditional hours are predictability of schedules, flexibility to take time off and dependability of having enough hours. Many jobs in this category don’t offer any of these qualities, and research shows how the impact of the stress from this instability can trickle down to children in the household. With the growth of jobs like these and people often juggling multiple gigs, Pilarz thinks it’s important to remind people — and policymakers who are considering workplace scheduling laws — that work–life balance is different for those who have jobs beyond the nine-to-five grind.
“When people talk about work– life balance, they often talk about it from the perspective of people like me who work salary jobs and have a lot of work to do but have adequate pay and benefits,” Pilarz says. “But for some people who work in low-wage jobs or low-quality jobs, it means something very different. It’s not about working too many hours but working enough hours to make ends meet.”
Life-Changing Reads
We asked two professors to share the books that impacted their outlook on work–life balance.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig
When Ankur Desai, professor and the chair for the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, is looking for wisdom on time and how to manage it, he looks for examples of lives lived well by others. That insight might be found in works of fiction, memoirs, even obituaries in the local paper. He says, “Obits are all about time. The time you spent living. Where did you go, what did you do, who were you with, whose lives did you touch?” Another unexpected source of inspiration is this work of fiction about a summer motorcycle trip across America’s Northwest. Desai says that this classic book, while not entirely factual about Buddhism or motorcycle repair, weaves in insights about the importance of dedication to the task at hand, finding “gumption” to accomplish it and sharing that journey with others.
Sisters of Yam: Black Women and Self-Recovery by bell hooks (MA’76)
When Cindy I-Fen Cheng, the Robinson Edwards Professor of American History, arrived in Madison nearly 20 years ago, she remembers feeling uprooted and alienated. She had immigrated from Taipei, Taiwan, to the United States when she was 7 years old but had only lived in the Los Angeles area. “I left a place where my ties ran deep to go to the Midwest, where I knew no one and where very few people looked like me,” she says. She was passionate about growing the Asian American Studies Program and emboldened by the fact that her job existed thanks to activists who fought for it. But all this left her feeling like she wasn’t doing enough while simultaneously doing too much. Sisters of the Yam helped her get through those feelings. The book showed her that she wasn’t alone and that this journey was a common experience for women of color. It also outlined how to turn feelings of alienation into a passion to get things done.
