Category Archives: Work/Life Balance

How do you do it?

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I’m often asked and I’ve never known quite what to say to this question.  After all, like the proverbial “how are you,” often times the questioner doesn’t really want to know and certainly doesn’t want to engage in a discussion on the answer.  Sometimes the question is a way of paying a compliment – like when someone says “Thanks for having us over for dinner on a work night, how do you do it ?” (e.g. you must have worked hard in advance to pull this off).  It’s nice in those cases to be appreciated.

But what if it’s really a question seeking an answer as advice? This is where I struggle with answering.  I am twenty-five years down the path of working (or being in school) full-time while being a parent.   I’ve learned (and am still learning) things from those experiences that could be worth sharing.  On the other hand, I feel it’s a bit presumptuous to assume that what works for me will work for others.  Also, the real answer is a combination of the important and the mundane and the mundane feels too…well…mundane to describe. With this as caveat I’ll start with what I consider the important, and I’ll save the mundane for when I’m feeling humorous.  So here goes:

First – marry the right person.  I cannot imaging doing “it” (it being defined as balancing a demanding job and parenting) solo.  My husband and I have truly been partners – respecting both of our careers as equally important and both contributing to managing the household.  That doesn’t mean each doing half of each chore but it does mean each doing what feels like more than 50% of the load.  The responsibilities have ebbed and flowed over the years – Steve has picked up much of the cooking and grocery shopping (he’s both good at it and picky about the result hence the switch).  I do most of the laundry, doctor’s appointments, kids shopping (though he has always done the toys).  He does sports, I do music.  He’s the home math tutor, I’m the essay editor.  He pays the bills, I am IT support for the family.

For a great read on this topic I recommend Getting to 50/50 http://www.amazon.com/Getting-50-Working-Couples-Sharing/dp/0553806556.  When I was at the WSJ Women in the Economy conference in April it was incredible how often I heard this same refrain, with the women CEO’s who had children pointing to their true partnership with their spouse as the key ingredients.

Second – be willing to make the tradeoffs necessary to minimize your commute. Not much explanation needed here – all of us have the same 24 hours in a day.  The commute hours represent a huge percentage of potential parenting hours and yes, it unfortunately tends to replace personal time not work time.   Not to mention being nearby in case of sick children, parent/teacher conferences, etc.

More on this tomorrow…

Freedom from time and space – courtesy of the cloud

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I started my first full-time job as “Government Channel Manager” on May 16, 1988 working for Informix.  I had just finished my MBA program the prior Friday.  Steve (my husband) and Derek (2.5 years old) packed up our apartment’s few possessions and met me in California a few days later.  I was pregnant with our second son Todd, due on June 24.  Yes, my first boss (George Billman to whom I will be eternally grateful) hired me at 8 months pregnant (more on that in a future blog).  Suffice it to say I worked at Informix for 6 years in a variety of roles.

It is incredible how much has changed since then.  At Informix we were heavy email users (very modern of us using a program called “Elm”) but in 1988 we didn’t have laptops.  Nor internet access at home.  No cell phone.  Bottom line, if I had work to do, I pretty much needed to do it at my office.  If I had to leave the office for a doctor’s appointment for one of my boys, I was out of touch for that hour or two.  If I didn’t finish my work by dinnertime, too bad, I needed to be in the office during the evening and miss that time with the boys.  I was lucky to live only a few miles from Informix’s headquarters so I could do a bit of back and forth if I needed to work late, but for the most part I was tethered to the office in those early years to get most of my work done.

By my last two years at Informix, I had a cell phone and a MacSE that I would bring home and I could connect to the network over slow dialup.  I got my first laptop while at Gupta.  By the time I got to Netscape in 1997 laptops and internet connectivity from home and while travelling were the norm.  The ability to leave work in time to have dinner with my children, give them their baths or help with homework (depending on age) and then finish my work after they went to bed (I’m a night owl anyhow) was transformative.  It was rare that the work couldn’t wait a few hours until my kids got to bed, but they couldn’t stay up late waiting for me to get home from work.  The parenting window of opportunity is already narrow for a working parent – being able to time and location shift allows us to maximize that narrow window.

I got my first Blackberry in 2003 and iPhone in 2008.  Now I am almost never without some sort of mobile device be it an app phone or tablet.  Using the power of the Cloud combined with these devices, there is almost no project that I can’t make progress on anywhere, including at a high-school lacrosse game!  Of course there is no substitute for being with coworkers face-to-face (and at SugarSync working as part of the team in the office is an important part of our culture) but for those special moments for our children, it is easier to be there because of the Cloud.  Of course there is the insidious side – am I really there at the event if I’m checking the device?  All I can say is for me it is a net positive, I know that I can be at events I otherwise would have to miss due to today’s technology.  It is up to me to be mindful of managing the distraction and being as present as possible for my kids.

Those of us in the daily juggle of balancing work and family are lucky to have these technologies to help us.  This is one of the main reasons I was so excited to build SugarSync – it is a technology I use constantly to help with my everyday life.

Let’s get it started

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Isn’t that the best advice for any project that seems hard?  A blog is no different so I’m starting here and now.

Welcome to my blog.

A brief explanation on the name.  Merriam Webster says the Kitchen Sink implies being made up of “a hodgepodge of disparate elements or ingredients”.  Often times I feel that life, or at least my life, is sort of a Kitchen Sink – work, kids, travel and other activities. I love the mixture, though I’m always trying to get it more organized and “in sync” – hence the Kitchen Sync.  Not to mention the fact that my company is all about syncing your digital life.

I’ve been reading a lot of blogs lately.  I get a lot of enjoyment from all of the ones I read regularly – but more than enjoyment, some have had such significant impact on me both personally and professionally that I thought it was my turn to contribute.  I hope that you enjoy my blog, but even more, I hope that I can share something from my experiences that will benefit you.