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Life + Work Hacks

Baby boomers advocated for work-life separation, generation X pushed for work-life balance, and now millennials are demanding that work and life coexist. Regardless of our age or whether we have a partner, kids, pets, professional hobbies, or any number of other personal responsibilities, we are all struggling to make it work in this messy 24/7 world. Superficial advice tips just don’t cut it in this category anymore, and “work-from-home Fridays” are not always the most productive solution.

We all struggle to make life and work work, but the barriers facing women are much more pronounced than they are for men—especially if you want to have a family. Did you know that pay parity between the sexes begins to drop the minute a woman chooses to have kids, and it never recovers? Not only does that pay gap widen; so too does the opportunity gap. The perception of working moms as unfocused and less reliable employees is a huge barrier to career advancement. And how often have you heard of companies being reluctant to hire women of childbearing age for fear that they will get pregnant and leave? Even if it was just once, that’s too many times.

I once attended a breakfast meeting at the Wing, a women-only coworking space in New York City. Beth Comstock, former chief marketing officer and vice chair of General Electric, was the host, and she asked each woman to share what was on her mind. One millennial woman made a remark that really struck me: “The narrative we hear as young women from more experienced successful women feels false.”

She described advice she’s listened to at panels inside and outside her company from women who shared their career journeys from the perspective of an opportunity-cost analysis. They focused predominantly on what you should be prepared to sacrifice personally to achieve your professional goals. She knew these women had a world of good intentions to inspire and empower younger women to keep their eyes wide open as they drive their careers. But their message did not land well.

Raised with an entrepreneurial mind-set and constantly bombarded with the pressure to disrupt the status quo, the next generation of young women are (rightly) refusing to sacrifice. Instead, they want work + life hacks. I define hack as a clever solution to a problem. Millennial women want the gritty battle stories, and they want every Instagram-worthy detail of the tricks the women before them have unearthed to bring about their big lives.

What do you do to stay present, disconnect, and keep sanity in your personal life while leading an organization of hundreds of people?

How on earth do you stay healthy and fit during the seasonal cycles when business hours spike?

How did you figure out how to travel abroad for work while nursing a newborn?

How did you negotiate your biggest salary jump without alienating your partner as you started to out-earn him or her?

Women need to know that living a full life inside and outside of work is truly possible—and that we have to fight for it. We have to dig our heels in to create a workplace that works for us and all of our priorities. In this chapter, women share their tripwires and the hacks they learned along the way to stay healthy and happy and to bring some harmony to the multi-hyphened demands that make their worlds go round. But first, a few words on the concept of flexibility.

Flexibility 101

We all need to understand the concept of flexibility and how to use it to thrive in the office and at home. It is a key negotiation factor for work-life integration. I believe that flexibility is not a perk of privilege or seniority; it’s a benefit that all women should have access to and be armed to negotiate for. Planning, prioritizing, communicating needs, asking for help, outsourcing activities, and valuing self-care time are the consistent best practices of women who feel they have a version of flexibility in their work.

I have learned a great deal about flexibility from my friend Anna Auerbach, cofounder of Werk, a company with technology to put flexibility data and insights into the hands of companies to help them work smarter for women. According to Anna, there are three types of work flexibility:

When you work (time of day)

Where you work

How ad hoc or set that schedule is

Consider your needs and your life outside of work. What kind of flexibility is most important to you? Which type is your company most willing to offer you? If your answer to that second question is “none,” you may be working in what’s come to be known as an “extreme job.”

Extreme jobs are defined as working sixty hours or more per week in a high-paying job with at least five of the following characteristics:¹

Unpredictable flow of work

Fast-paced work under tight deadlines

Inordinate scope of responsibility that amounts to more than one job

Work-related events outside regular work hours

Availability to clients 24/7

Responsibility for profit and loss

Responsibility for mentoring and recruiting

Large amount of travel

Large number of direct reports

Physical presence at workplace at least ten hours a day

Across the board, people with extreme jobs report that their work impacts on their ability to craft happy and healthy private lives. About 81 percent of women feel that their extreme job undermines their health, 76 percent feel that their extreme job gets in the way of a strong relationship with children, and 59 percent feel that it gets in the way of a good relationship with their spouse.²

Extreme jobs push women out of the workforce. In Anna’s research, she found that 69 percent of women said they wouldn’t have off-ramped if their companies had offered flexible work options, such as reduced-hour schedules, job sharing, part-time career tracks, or short unpaid sabbaticals.

A Hack-a-thon of Takeaways for Work + Life

The traditional career path (whether extreme or not) tends to be less appealing than a more cyclical path that allows women to define success in more holistic terms of personal fulfillment rather than just power. So how can women attain flexibility without sidetracking their careers? In the next sections, read the practical work + life hacks from women at all levels to find out!

Hack 1: Stay Connected to What Matters

For Michelle Carnahan of Sanofi, the key to successfully integrating life and work is having a good partner.

You have to have a good partner, whoever that partner is. If it’s a neighbor, if it’s a husband, if it’s a wife, a sister, a brother, a best friend, an assistant, a village, or all of these. Whoever that person is for you, you have to have a partner. You can’t do life alone. I’m just convinced of that.

Her second guiding principle is to establish outside-of-work nonnegotiables: your Thursday night CrossFit class, no work talk before 7 a.m., attending your kids’ piano recitals—whatever is important to you.

Then whatever those things are, you have to have some tactics that you practice. One of my tactics was, my kid was not going to be the last kid in day care. Now he may have been the first one there, and I may have missed a few baseball games or may have missed a few field trips, but he was never going to be the consistent last kid at day care! I have no idea why I picked that tactic, but it was a tactic that satisfied me, and it got us dinner together on most nights when I was in town.

So to me, there is no recipe for doing this; everybody has to do it in their own way. But I do think everybody needs a partner. I do think everybody has to have some things they believe in, and I do think everybody has to have some tactics that they put in that work for them, that they have to follow. And then you have to be agile.

My advice: Identify three nonwork priorities and your tactics for fulfilling them. If it’s an evening workout, figure out how to make it clear to the people who may need you at that time that you won’t be around then and will get back to them afterwards. If it’s no emails on the weekends, draft an automatic email response to assure people that you’ll be back on the ball come Monday morning.

Hack 2: Create an Air-Cover Plan

Life doesn’t stop just because you’re not at home. Who will water your plants? Feed your dog? Look after your kids? Get your mail? And what about at work? To whom can you turn to deal with emergencies while you’re away? Creating a network of friends, services, and colleagues to cover you during these times is key, says BlackRock’s Stephanie Epstein, who is also a mother of two.

First of all, I would say sometimes I feel like my life is being held together by a Band-Aid. But other times, it’s like a well-built machine. When I’m in New York, my husband, Andrew, a physician, and I coordinate to be home for the kids, each taking two opposite nights to work late. On those two days, I can plan late meetings and do things for me. And that has been the most transformational change I’ve made when I’m local.

When I’m not local, it’s heavily relying on Andrew, my nanny, and my SWAT team network of other moms in the school! Here is a really great example of why I need them. My oldest is in kindergarten, and there’s a lice breakout literally every single week at NYC schools. My SWAT team of moms from school know when I’m traveling, and they go straight to my nanny and tell her about lice during drop-offs and pickups. So that actually gives me a lot of comfort, because I know that my child will be hopefully lice free when I am traveling throughout India.

My advice: Map out whom you can call to help with which personal and professional responsibilities before you need them, so that when the time comes, all you have to do is activate your network.

Hack 3: Maintain Relationships with Nonwork Friends

Ambitious women driving hard toward their career goals in inflexible traditional organizations can find it easy to become hyperfocused “work martyrs.” Millennial women in particular are identifying “work martyr” as a badge of honor, not taking all of their fully earned vacation time and expressing more pronounced guilt about burdening others with time away from work.³ In the short term, this slave to their work obsession may boost their careers, but in the long term, it can only lead to burnout. Making time for friends outside of work is a form of self-care that can counter this hyperfocus on work. Nonwork friendships keep you grounded and remind you of the other parts of your life that may be easy to neglect while putting in hours at the office.

Kristen Shea is a vice president at The Kinetix Group and has been on the fast track in the health care industry ever since her graduation from Georgetown University eleven years ago.

I began my consulting career traveling every week–it sounded like an amazing opportunity at first to learn and grow in many ways in different cities and communities. What I quickly learned was, it then took a lot of effort and self-awareness on my part to maintain and grow my personal relationships while on the road. I am an avid list maker and I have learned that the most important priorities at the top of my list Monday morning are not what I have to get done for my clients for the week, but to touch base with my friends even if it’s over text, email, or a quick phone call. We are all at very different places in our lives, but maintaining that communication channel for me has given [us] the opportunity to stay in touch and create the space we may need from our routine, which we are so engrained in. I save one night a week for non-work activities and stick to that–creating boundaries has enabled me to refocus my energy on important relationships that inspire my ideas and creative drive in the work place and outside. One of my most cherished traditions is that a group of my college girlfriends [and I] have a monthly dinner at one of our apartments, and we haven’t missed a month in three years. We have all made a conscious effort to be engaged with each other, and it is something we value every time we get together. We all work hard, some have families, we all have less hours than we can count to do things for ourselves, and yet we all recognize and know it is important for our relationships and growth as women to maintain the strong bonds we built as millennials.

As busy as her days are, Stephanie of BlackRock makes sure to put time for hanging out with mom friends in her calendar to remind herself (and her workplace) that it is a nonnegotiable priority.

So a lot of moms do school drop-offs and pickups, and I don’t. I can’t afford to do that because I need to be at work really early. At first I felt like I was so disconnected and never managed to make plans work out. So I’ve created a process where my assistant will actually set up a breakfast once a month on a day where she knows I can do drop-off and hang with a mom or group of moms for an hour afterwards at a restaurant near the office. Because my assistant organizes it all, it actually happens consistently. So it’s just working it into whatever infrastructure works for you. And it’s really important for me to see them, because that is my community that surrounds my children and my family.

My advice: Make time with nonwork friends official by scheduling it into your work and life calendar. I know you may not have someone to whom you can delegate this responsibility, but it’s important enough to find some way for it to become a priority. Try using a regular online calendar system and set a reminder on your phone once a month to reach out and make plans. Even the act of setting a reminder will keep it top of mind.

Hack 4: Optimize Your Off Time

If early Friday dinners with your family are a priority, consider when you can make up that time elsewhere. Jen Schubach of Pfizer likes to work late some nights and early others so that her Fridays always end early. Here’s her hack for making the transition from weekend to weekday easier:

I’ll send a bunch of emails on a Sunday night after the kids are in bed, but I’ll delay the delivery until Monday so that people who work for me aren’t freaking out but my Monday becomes easier.

My advice: Find the dead time in your schedule and use it efficiently to allow more space for your priorities.

Hack 5: Keep Your Skills Fresh

Working at larger institutions can be challenging, and the glacial pace at which change often occurs can make you crave a more fast-paced start-up environment. Before you jump ship, consider how you can stay with your company to leverage all the equity you’ve already built while keeping your mind and skills sharp for your continued climb up the ladder. Kate Leiser of Lilly has this tip for staying energized in her corporate career:

I like to start things and then pass them along. I think right now with this job in many ways I’m giving myself freedom, and my leadership is giving us freedom to act like a start-up, even though we have all our processes in place. I’m figuring out how to thrive in this big thirty-six-thousand-person company where the habits of agility and looking for inspiration outside of our industry weren’t always appreciated or known. I’m satisfying my hunger for that start-up experience by continuing to build knowledge, relationships, and skills that will make me more successful. If I wasn’t learning anything, I would jump ship, but I continue to learn a ton. And I want to be here and prove that we can be nimble, innovative, and transformative, particularly for women.

My advice: Even if you’ve been at your company for years, channel your inner entrepreneur to champion a new initiative. It may or may not be related to your current role, but make sure it aligns with your long-term goals. The energy boost from working on something new and growing new skills will only add to your success.

Hack 6: Pace Yourself during Transitions

Things are slow . . . until they’re not. Managing life and work priorities may be the most difficult during times of transition—for example, when relocating your family for a new job. There is a world of innovation that is overdue in the area of corporate relocation. Despite the many pamphlets, moving company guides, and “Welcome to Your New City” websites, this can be an overwhelming experience, stalling your ability to be effective in your new role because personal demands are in limbo. Prioritizing your needs and those of your family is crucial during these times, and you will need the support of your company as well as your network.

Chelsea Mohler, manager in Lilly’s Manufacturing Division, took a promotion that would move her husband and three kids from Indianapolis, Indiana, to San Juan, Puerto Rico. Here is what she learned:

Research all the relocation resources your company provides and take advantage of them all.

Anticipate what the new day-to-day routine may be like and talk it through with your family and your new boss and colleagues so that everyone is on the same page.

Talk with your family about what the next few months may hold (e.g., travel, long days, different housing or child-care situations) to get them comfortable with all the changes.

Contact someone within your company who is currently in that location—would he or she be willing to help ramp up your relocation readiness?

Chelsea packed up her home and shipped it all to Puerto Rico. Three weeks later, Hurricane Maria hit and devastated the area. You can’t always plan for life. Life happens, and this is the time when you need to know that you and your family are surrounded by a support network of people who genuinely care, helping you navigate unforeseen and stressful situations. Inspired by her own experiences, Chelsea created a program at Lilly for women across her company who are moving through key career transitions, such as global assignments and first-time managers to help them feel supported, knowledgeable, and confident so that they can succeed at work and at home.

My advice: In times of change and uncertainty, communication is key. Once you have your work and life priorities clear, make sure that the people who matter are aware so that they can support you in your efforts.

Owning Your Time

Even with all the work + life hacks out there, it is not always going to be smooth sailing as an ambitious woman who also has life priorities. Sometimes it’s the worst of both worlds, Jen Schubach admits.

It’s not so easy. It’s really hard. I’m not saying that it isn’t also hard to stay home, but it’s not all “You go girl, everything is great!” and you walk out the door with this briefcase where you go to work and your kids are smiling. No, it’s super hard sometimes because one kid is crying HARD. Or you know your child care just isn’t going to handle something the way you would if you were there personally.

At other times it’s the best because you get to fulfill all the different parts of you and really thrive as a person—not just as an executive or a mom or a partner or a daughter. And when you assume agency in regard to your time, goals, and priorities, you can work to your highest effectiveness over a sustained period.

What are your top five priorities in your personal life? What are your top five priorities in your work life? What boundaries do you need to establish to accomplish both sets of priorities?