How do you find work life balance?

Hi everyone, welcome back to another episode of Ask Five. My name is Monica Molinero, and today I'm joined by Allison. Alison, do you mind introducing yourself to our audience really quickly? Hi, I'm Alison Christensen. I'm a PhD candidate in the Institute of Health Sciences Education. Awesome. Thank you so much for joining me. And so today I was wondering if you could introduce the question that our five were asked for this.

Yes, the question is how do you find work-life balance? It's a good question. Let's see what our five had to say. Beth Cummings, I'm an associate member of the Institute of Health Sciences Education and an associate professor in general internal medicine in the Department of Medicine. Hi, I'm Farhan. Um I am my evenings, nights and weekends job is that I'm a pediatric intensive care physician at the Montreal Children's Hospital.

Uh, McGill University Health Center. I'm an associate member at the IHSC at McGill, and uh my other job is that I am the um uh Director of Assessment and Certification slash Examiner in Chief at the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada. Hi, I'm Darusha Nadu. I'm a clinical psychologist by training, but currently I'm Canada Research Chair in Equity and Social Justice in Global Medical Education at the University of Ottawa. Um, and I'm a South African. Aliki Thomas.

I am a an occupational therapist by clinical background, so that's many, many, many years ago. But I am now an associate professor in the school of physical and occupational therapy at McGill University. I also hold an appointment at the Institute of Health Sciences Education in the same faculty of medicine and health sciences at McGill. And I am also a researcher at the Center for Interdisciplinary Uh Research in Rehabilitation, so one of the largest rehab research centers in the country.

Um yeah, I think that's that's who I am. So today I'm joined by I'm from the Institute of Health Sciences Education at McGill University. I'm an associate professor there, and I'm also the co-associate director of graduate programs.

So Beth, how do you find work-life balance? That assumes that I have work-like balance. So I think I think what work life balance looks like um evolves over time. And I think it has to be a combination of external life pressures as well as your own decision to make space. I think part of the way to find balance is by deciding what really matters and prioritizing those things.

So, um and and kind of figuring out what you can let go of um and that it won't actually matter that much in the end. Um, I'm I've always been someone that if I do something, I do it a hundred percent. I don't say yes and then give it eighty percent. Um but I've learned that my hundred percent is probably many other people's hundred and fifty percent.

um on certain things and on other things my hundred percent might be there eighty percent. And I think to me that was a really key piece in trying to calibrate and find the balance because I know what a hundred percent is that I have to give to actually achieve the outcome. That's a hundred percent outcome. And it's not about giving as giving as much of yourself until you burn out, but giving the 100% that's required to get the outcome that you need.

And I think that's a really that was sort of like a life altering moment when I kind of started to look at it that way. So for stuff that I'm less good at or is harder for me, I kind of have to give 120% and exhaust myself to get the outcome that I want. But for certain things that are actually easier, I don't have to like I don't have to do that. I can I can

I can give it what it needs as opposed to the most I can give. And I think that's a really important piece of of work like balance. I think the other thing is it's important to kind of schedule time for the stuff that matters. So if um if um it's not for me specifically at all. In fact I hate the gym, but if the gym is important, schedule going to the gym, right? And the same way you schedule meetings and the same way you schedule um your writing time if you're doing it right.

Schedule gym time because that time's actually really important. If if that's what matters to you, it's actually rejuvenating, re-energizing. Sometimes good ideas come when you're doing not the thing that you think you're doing, actually. um because your mind is kind of free to to explore and roam. And I think the other part of of work life balance comes from kind of recognizing that everyone's replaceable.

Um, especially especially me. Um, but I think it's true about about everyone that um as I thought through kind of my my life and well, people aren't really replaceable in your family or your closest friends aren't replaceable. But in our work we're all kind of really replaceable. And that doesn't mean that other people would do it the same way or there isn't something

special or unique or valuable that we add or that our careers are meaningless, far from it. Everything that we add is so important um and of exceptional value and and

um in clinical medicine is a value to our colleagues and our patients and in the research world is a value to the community as well. But I think when you kind of recognize that if suddenly you weren't there, and whether you aren't there because there's an illness or a family situation or you get the schedule wrong and forget to show up to a meeting.

And actually the whole thing still kinda happened and nothing really bad happened can actually kind of take a step back and realize that there are things you can really say no to and it'll be okay. Um and I think to me the The thing that's really important about those nos is that the nos that you give have to be strategic, the same way the yeses have to be strategic. You have to kind of decide, is the time that this is going to take and energy that this is gonna take?

going to be value added, not just for me, but for the the community or the project or whatever it is that I want to do? And does it fit with everything else that I have? Do I actually have space for it?

as if not, something else has to go and is of if what I give up worth taking this new thing on, um, because time is finite and energy is finite, and I think that's kind of a really important um lens to to bring to it and and I think we can all think of people we worked with um, who we thought, Oh my God, what are we ever gonna do when that person retires or uh leaves and then suddenly they get a job and they move cities and they're working somewhere else and like

Yes, it's hard and there are bums. And then a couple months later, it's not that they've been forgotten. They've left a legacy. People have learned from them and got tremendous value from their being there, but also the whole place didn't collapse. Um, and I think sometimes we overestimate how much we need to be in every room all the time compared to how much we can um how much more we can actually give when we're

Still doing a ton of things, but a bit selective um in what we engage with. How do you think you'd answer this question, Farhan?

It it's really difficult. Um, you know, I tell this story to junior colleagues and and mentees. I did a terrible job of it when I started. Um, I was really not doing things well. Um, if I could change anything in my life, it would be to go back and change the the first three years after my first child was born. Um, I worked too much, I traveled too much, I was too focused on career.

Um and I think I learned over time to do to do that better and we have a second child and a third child and and really have tried to find uh much more balance in that. Um, you know, nobody Nobody on their deathbed says, I wish I worked more. lots of people say I wish I've s would have spent more time with family. And I was fortunate to to have some

Senior mentors who had uh, you know, were were getting on and and in in age and and were starting to look back at their careers and and brought that up to me and said, You're doing really well academically, you're doing really well clinically. But maybe think about this. That was great. Great advice. Took it in. Um there's this beautiful quote by um uh Brian Dyson, who is uh former uh CEO of of Coca-Cola.

And summing it up, he talks about um life uh sort of as a game, and you have five balls. You're juggling these five balls, and these five balls are work. uh family, health, friends, and spirit. And the five balls, four of them are made out of glass, and that's your family, your friends, your spirit, your health. One of them is made out of rubber, and that's your work. So think about which one you're going to let draw.

Because if you let the class one drop, it will be irr irreversibly scuffed or broken. If you let the work one drop, it's okay. It's gonna bounce back. There's gonna be other opportunities. You're gonna have to think about things. But you'll always have that opportunity to refix things, to work on things. So if you're thinking about that from a career standpoint, always think about those other things, prioritize them.

In the end, that's what's going to make you happy. Um, and maybe learn from colleagues that are telling you this that might have gone through it and and have changed focus and um and and thought about how to improve things themselves. Definitely. It's also, you know, when you're just starting out and you're junior, you're trying your hardest

I don't want to say to impress people, but there's a lot of demands on you and your time to be considered accomplished in in some capacity, right? So, you know, looking back on your experience, do you still feel like If you had spent more time at home and with your family, like you can still juggle being accomplished or hitting whatever metrics you needed to hit at work and also still being able to spend more time.

Yeah, I I think it comes down to um, you know, what you value. And I think there is a really wonderful part of academics where you feel self-fulfilled by going out and presenting at a conference. When you get invited to give a conference presentation, a keynote, You're jacked about that. And you get to travel to these great places and and deliver a a a talk that people want to listen to. And I think that's a it's a great experience. Um and I think we should all do that.

I think the problem becomes when you do that too much. And, you know, for me it was traveling very often to give presentations um regularly. but wouldn't even get to see the place that I went to, wouldn't get a chance to really even um socialize with the people that invited you. And I think those were lost opportunities. And so for me, what's made me happier to say I will go less often. But I'll try to spend a little bit more time as I'm going.

And the less that I go, the better. Like, you know, just a few times. And anything that I can do now in the world's change and anything I can do virtually, much happier with than what I, you know, than than having to to travel regularly. Um you know, when you get into that mode of it's all about your academics, you do things like Fly halfway around the world, and spend more time in planes.

than you do on the ground in those countries. And that's that's not enjoyable, that's not sustainable. It is wonderful opportunities, but you have to think of limiting those and then enjoying each one a little bit more. If you're doing good work, those opportunities will come. They might come in different ways, but they're going to come and they won't they won't disappear. So Terusha. How do you find work-life balance in academic life?

Mm, that's an interesting question for me because mine has gotten way better since I came to Canada for many reasons. Uh, when I worked in South Africa, I worked as a clinician. I headed up a clinical department and I was supervising many students. It was a very, very busy public hospital in South Africa, tons of people, different languages. a very serious illness, and I had both my kids who were at school, and I had my teaching job, my clinical teaching job, and my research job.

So the way I managed work life balance then was routine. I made sure that I had a specific routine around work. around spare time and I was selfish about making time for myself, even if it meant waking up really early to go for a run, or making sure that I blocked some time off on a on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon to go and have coffee or walk on the beach with a very stimulating friend. Um, and then um hobbies that I could

crochet. So I made sure that my routine was very structured. So I got quite a bit of work done, but it's really hard. And I have to say this is the thing that I have the most empathy with for, and I'm going to try and do some work around it. is being a working mom. Being a woman and being a working mother is really extremely difficult. And I tried to block it out of my mind to think how difficult it was, but I when I sit on podc o on on um

calls on on Zoom calls and I see some colleague with a baby or a feeding bottle or trying to appease a toddler, I feel that. So Balancing that meant routine, for me, a very strict routine. But the caveat or the downside to that was that I didn't have as much time for the kind of big project. and creative expressions. Since I've moved to Canada, both my sons are at university

I have I'm very, very lucky to have got this candidate research chair, which uh gives me time and funding. It is The most phenomenal thing because although we we get those in South Africa, they're not as many and not as available for all types of research. My my research is quite different to what Canada's usually s supported, like a s South researcher. So it's a very big privilege. So I went from having to manage my routine very strictly around work life balance

So having more time to think, which is a huge luxury. So If you don't have the luxury of time, you have to be very strict and very But to acknowledge that creativity is very difficult and big projects are very difficult when you when you have that work like balance. I'm I'm just reflecting on my own experience. And when you do have um more time

your work changes. So again I must say I have a great deal of empathy and I want to advocate for the fact that women's voices are not as loud, proud, and front in research because of the time demands that we have. And it's really unfair.

What's your opinion on this, Leaky? You're speaking to an occupational therapist. Oh, this is such a good question. Um, I will not bore you with all the theoretical and empirical conversations around the word balance because it is a a core tenet of of our profession. So, but what I will tell you is that balance is one of the most subjective constructs that there are out there.

And so first of all, this business with 888 does not work. This eight leisure, eight sleep, eight work. Balance is What is important to you? So for me, balance what is very, very important. So I'm a mother.

uh you know, I'm a partner, um I'm a daughter, I have a lot of other roles and so those roles are very, very important to me. So if I feel that my work is impinging upon my quality time with my family or my ability to take my mom for a medical appointment if if she absolutely needs me, then I start feeling a little bit of anxiety.

Um, but it's not about, you know, I have to work from eight in the morning till six p.m. and then have three hours to relax and then I have eight hours to sleep. So balance for me, Monica, is how do I feel? So it's grand season. It's October. It's March, right? Some people would look at you and I and say they have no balance, right? Because it's been a week since we've gone for a walk. We're at McGill until eight o'clock at night. Um, we're having leftovers or ordering food out.

But if you are happy and satisfied that you're sp you're submitting your work because there's some pressures for you in your case, you know, to get tenure, then I think that if you were to force yourself to go to the gym for that one week. If you were forcing yourself to have a cooked home cooked meal every day. If you felt somehow compelled, unless there's very serious reason, to go visit a loved one every single day or three days during that week, to me, that creates an artificial imbalance.

That is not healthy. And I'll I tell you that not just as a researcher, but as an occupational therapist. That's why I say that balance is very, very different. But if there are periods of there are periods of time where those very few times in in our careers as academics where it's a little bit slower, I say that with a small S, um, summers.

holidays, maybe March break, you know. Um And you're feeling like you're constantly catching your breath, that to me is a lack of balance, meaning you haven't or the system hasn't allowed us to put in affordances, just slow down a little bit. So there's that, right? There's everything around the concept of balance. And like I said, I won't bore you with all the theoretical um issues around it, but for me, I um

I'm glad we're talking because I am uh you know, an associate professor, I've been at this for fifteen years. Um I now have made difficult but important decisions, and they are about balance. So I will not answer emails after six o'clock. I will not work on weekends. I will not as much as I adore my colleagues get on a project three days before a grant is due. Right? I have just made decisions like that because the

for what they evoke, the reward isn't big enough. And so they evoke a lot of stress. Um, I say this with the utmost humility. Please, you know, take this with humility with a capital H. I don't need to have another grant. I don't need another paper. I want to do good work.

And not at the expense of my health and not at the expense of my of my family, right? And not at the expense of the fact that, you know, you have kids who are teenagers, they're graduating, it's prom, right? There's all these life events that happen. Um, that I think is really, really important. So the reason why I love having this conversation with you today is because I hope that people like me give more junior colleagues permission to do that. It's gotten out of control.

You know, it's gotten out of control. You need to meet some criteria, we need to meet some benchmarks. to get tenure and we need to be n to meet some benchmarks to do good work, you know, and to be liberated. And you have a salary award and we're so proud of you and that gives you more time to do research. Same thing with me. Now I have a chair.

But I think, and I say this in quotation marks, we have earned a little bit of the right to be selective. Because I learned the hard way. I saw people around me get sick. I saw people, um, I saw marriages breaking up, I saw relationships breaking up. I had difficult, you know, issues myself with my health, et cetera. And I don't want that for anybody. I don't want it for myself. And so I'm trying now to put in processes in place early.

to have, oh, the dreaded balance word, equilibrium, if you wish. I think I like that better. Just to feel happy in what I'm doing. I have enough time in my research to do good work. And hopefully my goal is to be a good role model. Really, really want to be a good role model. So Miriam, how do you find work-life balance in academic life?

What makes you think I have it? I don't know. I'm just kind of asking. I'm just joking. Um, so this is a lesson I learned during my PhD, my second year as a matter of fact. I was becoming completely overwhelmed with work. I had two little children. I wasn't getting a lot of sleep and something that I've loved doing my whole life is exercising. I love to exercise. I don't like like actually doing it, but when it's over, I love the feeling of accomplishment.

And so there was at least six months to maybe almost a year where I wasn't exercising very much and I was miserable. And I realized how important that was to my life. So I decided that exercise was non negotiable. And as soon as I did, I became a happier person because even when I'd had one of those nights where I was trying to meet a deadline and I was up till two in the morning Um, because I'm a procrastinator and I I worked a deadlines.

Um even on a night where I had like four hours of sleep, I would still force myself to go to a gym class or something, whether it's at eight in the morning, seven in the morning, whatever time, it didn't matter. I would never sleep in, I would just do it. And as soon as I made exercise non-negotiable, I became a happier person. So I would say in order to achieve that balance is to find what those non-negotiables are for you.

So whether it That's going for walks, whether it's reading a novel, whether it's You know, streaming a movie, whatever they are, those non-negotiables, find them and protect them and value them and don't let anything get in the way because the work will never end if you're lucky.

You know, when you're thinking of work life balance, a lot of people bring up social networks or social support that they have. Do you feel like there was someone or something in your social circle that was a big source of support to maintain work life? I mean it's for me it was very helpful to have people who understood my pain.

And that meant um, you know, people who were in the same I don't know if you've heard this expression, season of their life as I was. So I was really, really fortunate when I started my doctoral studies to on my very first day I met someone in the lab who was sitting next to me, who had two young kids, who was one year younger than me, and we were in the exact same stage of our lives, the same season of our lives. And just as well.

you know, we're still friends, we still text and see each other and have fun and so on and just having that one person who completely got it when I said, I'm exhausted or I'm this or I'm that or this person's getting on my nerves or you know, I can't write another word today. Whatever it was, it was really, really helpful for me. But we're all different. We all need different things. We're all snowflakes.

So I don't think there that there is, you know, one answer to your question. I think everybody needs different things and and that's okay. It's just recognizing what you need and making sure that you have it.

So Alison, what'd you think? Well uh I suppose it sounds obvious, but it it appear occur I suppose it sounds obvious, but it occurs to me that time is a really limited resource, right? And for many of us in academia, we have jobs that we love. Um, even those of us who are training to be PhDs were doing work that we love. And so it's about picking between lots of things that we love. We love our families, we love our friends, we love our work.

Um and at any given time, some of those can replenish us and they can also deplete us. And I I think this idea of making a calculation about how much effort something requires is interesting. That's not something I'd considered before. Um, and I think it it makes a lot of sense from a productivity standpoint. If we think of our energy as finite.

um and we understand what our capacity is at a given time, depending on the difficulty of the work and what might be going on outside, I think it's a really valuable way to think about it. The other thing that really resonated with me was this idea of maybe there not being an exact formula to work-life balance. Because I think the way it's talked about a lot is that there is a work-life balance and you will find it, or you should find it.

Um, and so I think the point about how that could look different depending on where you are in your career, where you are in your family life. Um is very helpful because I think There just there's just not an exact formula all the time. And it helps to not put pressure on ourselves to get it exactly right, knowing that there will be times when there are greater demands put on us for work. And there are times when we just really need to be around the people we love.

I think one of the things that I struggle with in my own professional and academic life is what does work look like? And I have often taken a very traditional view of that. So if I'm not sitting at a my computer or sitting at a desk or and maybe in some cases working with a patient, maybe I'm not doing work. And the way that my thinking has evolved is I could be gardening and that's opening space for me to think about my work in a different way.

Um, and so perhaps that is a different way of working. And so I think there is value when we think about work life balance, whether we're talking about exercise or hobbies or Taking rest? that that contributes to work. And so maybe it's not as clear a distinction as sometimes we make it sound, that it's either work or life, right? But thinking about how all those things come together.

I think that's a really great insight and It sounds similar to advice I had gotten throughout my PhD, which was make sure you're moving your body or engaging in hobbies that are regular to you because that's the reason why people have shower epiphanies because you're engaging your body or engaging in a habit that you're so used to and is considered maybe a form of rest or a form of relaxation.

And that's the moment where your thoughts have time to settle or when some of your best thinking comes to you in some way. Absolutely agree. Yeah. Yeah, so I'm glad that we're on the same page with that. But it's a really great insight. I really appreciate you bringing it forward. And I really appreciate you joining me for this episode, Allison. My pleasure. Amazing. So to everyone else, thank you so much for joining us and we hope to see you for the next episode of Ask Five.

Ask 5 was created by Meredith Young, Monica Molinero, and Tamara Carver. Hosted by Monica Molinero, produced by the Office of EdTech, and financially supported by the Institute of Health Sciences Education and Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences at McGill University. Thanks for listening.