You just got off a client call in your breach of contract matter (1.4 hours). You previously worked on your brief seeking class certification in another case (2.8 hours) and prepared for a deposition in your securities litigation (3.1 hours). You need to attend to a bit of firm management (0.5 hours) and draft one more email (0.6 hours) before you can head out the door.
Nobody would describe this as balancing your work. It is simply work.
Every lawyer — whether at a firm, in-house or with the government — has to juggle various tasks and different matters throughout the day. The best lawyers know which tasks and matters need immediate attention and which ones can wait. Which ones are safe to delegate and which require personal involvement.
It is therefore perplexing that we use that ubiquitous yet misleading concept of “work-life balance” to describe what I would simply call “living.” Balance necessarily requires a scale, with “work” on one side either raising or lowering the quality of your “life” on the other.
No wonder we see women leave the legal profession in droves — focusing on your career seems directly at odds with being a wife, mother and fulfilled individual. If you are doing well in one area, you are detracting from the other. And if you’ve achieved parity in both, the results seem middling. There is no way to win.
The problem doesn’t lie with how much we have to do but rather with how we frame the problem itself. Time to dispense with that masochistic construct of “balance.” Instead, we strive for excellence in our personal pursuits just as we do in our careers, expanding our ambitions rather than balancing them. I want to be as good of a wife and mother as I am a lawyer, so life gets slotted in right alongside work. Attending soccer game (1.0 hours). Pediatrician appointment (1.5 hours). Date night with my husband (2 hours).
Of course, we must also learn to prioritize and delegate life tasks, an area where working moms often feel unnecessary pangs of guilt. I cannot make every bake sale at school, and I know I will never have the bandwidth to be room mom. But this is no different from the fact that I cannot say yes to serving on every firm committee, nor can I review every deposition in a case. I am comfortable delegating these tasks at the office, and so I must be able to do so at home too. In fact, often we’re all better off for it when I accept outside help. For instance, my husband and I moved from New York City to Dallas so that we would be near family when our children were young. Not only can grandparents offer immense assistance in raising their grandchildren, but the benefits of strengthening familial bonds run both ways while also enriching the lives of everyone in our multigenerational family.
The author Nora Roberts once likened this blending of life with work to juggling various balls. Some are rubber — we can drop those balls if necessary and the show will go on. But other balls are glass — if one shatters, it will take a while to pick up the pieces. The trick is two-fold: First, we must learn which balls are rubber and which are glass and, importantly, at which times which is which. What was once a rubber ball may turn glass because it has not received enough care recently. And what was once a glass ball may now be rubber because we have fortified that relationship. Second, we cannot waste an ounce of energy on a dropped rubber ball, otherwise we will have no energy left to keep the glass ones in the air. I do not fret that I cannot take my middle daughter to her weekly dance class. That is a rubber ball that I can drop and my daughter wouldn’t care. But you better believe I will move heaven and earth to make it to her final recital. If I dropped that glass ball, she would be devastated.
Make no mistake, the constant juggle takes significant mental and emotional effort, especially during major life changes.
I am writing this piece while on maternity leave with my third daughter, but my law partners joke that I should put quotation marks around the word “leave” since I never seemed to have stopped working in the first place. That choice was intentional. A gradual ramp-up to full time work suits my growing practice and mental health much better than disappearing for several months only to jump into the deep end upon my return.
To be clear, I am not sacrificing precious time with my new baby. Instead, I figure out a way to slot in work around naps and feedings and walks through the park with the stroller. It is not easy to juggle all of this as my family and I adjust to our new normal, but if it was easy then everyone would do it.
Teddy Roosevelt once said, “Nothing in the world is worth having or worth doing unless it means effort, pain, difficulty.” I find beauty in my intricate juggling act, intense pride in my effort.
One further point that is often overlooked: Personal success can accelerate professional success. For instance, my child’s soccer game becomes fertile ground for meeting other parents to develop business. Family dinners help to unwind from the day and bring joy to my life. Seeking to serve as a committed wife and doting mother has made me a better lawyer: I am more patient with associates, more insightful when thinking about cases, more empathetic in front of a judge and jury. Unlike a scale, improving my life usually improves my work.
And so I urge us all to put to bed the myth of work-life balance and to pick up juggling instead. We will be much happier and more successful for it.
LeElle Slifer is a trial partner in the Dallas office of Winston & Strawn.