Work Life Tapestry

This is Saanvi.

To be precise - this is Saanvi, my now-elementary-aged kiddo, the day I went back to work after maternity leave.

This was also the day when I remember reading about
Work-Life Balance and rolling my eyes 🙄

Over the past 10 years I have juggled household chores/repairs, family needs, school activities, travel, hobbies - in short “life” - alongside everything that goes in “work” including the core work, the demands of leading a global organization of 200+, community contributions and more. I also added a bunch more stuff under “student” to this explosive mix for a couple of years and lived to tell the tale! 💣💥

I’m always asked in talks, panels and even in mentoring/coaching 1:1s how I do this all. In this post I’ll try and answer this.

First, let’s replace the word “Balance” with “Tapestry”.

Weaving in work and life together to create something beautiful resonates with me far more than calculating the exact amount of weight you’ll assign to each area for balance.

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Weaving Life

Here are a few principles I’ve found useful in weaving the life part of my work-life tapestry.

1. Quality over Quantity

Given the time I spend with Saanvi is limited, I tilt towards quality over quantity. I’m always looking for what we can do together that would make the strongest core memories for us all. Some activities that fit this criteria:

• School projects. We turn some of these into family projects where everyone pitches in with enthusiasm!

• Volunteering. At school it gives us a chance to see Saanvi’s daily life. On Sundays, I volunteer as a teacher for Gurukul, an organization that teaches kids Indian culture and languages.

• Travel. We try and do 2-3 memorable trips a year as a family.

Prioritizing your categories that bring the most joy is important. But even in those categories, it’s important to recognize that there will be activities you have to let go. Doing every school project with the same enthusiasm is impossible. Neither is it feasible for us to volunteer for everything at school or to travel all the time.

2. The Family Firm

If you are a working parent in a dual-career-couple (DCC) household, I highly recommend reading Tiffany Dufu’s Drop the Ball and Emily Oster’s The Family Firm. These books helped us approach running our household equitably by applying the same teamwork and delegation principles that good leaders need to use at work. We trade off tasks and, most importantly, we trust each other as a team to run our family firm.

Here are a few examples to illustrate this:

• During my MBA in one of my weak mom-guilt moments I volunteered to run the Holi activity at Saanvi’s school. I planned the activity, got all the materials together and was excited to do it with Saanvi’s class. BUT when the day arrived, I was swamped with work and MBA commitments. My husband volunteered to run the activity instead and the kids still had fun!

• As some of you know, I’m currently on a break between jobs. Given I have more bandwidth currently, I’m picking up a lot of household tasks that we back-burnered while we were all busy. Everything from cleaning our closets to scheduling a tune-up for our solar panels.

• Both of us had work travel one year during Saanvi’s preschool Mother’s Day and Father’s Day events. Each of us was traveling at EXACTLY the time when we were needed for our event. We just switched who went to which event and that was it! It was a cool teaching moment for Saanvi also that both days celebrated parents no matter the gender.

4. Lower Your Expectations

I love this Phils-osophy quote from Phil Dunphy in the show Modern Family:

With so many irons in the fire at the same time, there are bound to be some misses - sometimes at work and sometimes at not-work. Instead of expecting perfection each time, I’ve learnt to look at these moments as additions to our work-life tapestry. Some are to be remembered and some give learnings but all are part of life!

Here are some examples of my misses this year:

• Enjoyed a disconnected winter break in Turkey with family but got behind on some time-sensitive, important work matters as a result and ended up disappointing some team members.

• Got caught up in work and forgot about a school assignment until the night before and had to rush to get it done with Saanvi.

• Misread the Gurukul annual calendar dates and double-booked Vamsi’s milestone birthday celebration over the curriculum day that I should have attended as a teacher and parent.

5. It takes a Village

I first heard this phrase as a new mom when I was yet to grasp the meaning. Now, I repeat this everytime the work-life questions pop up! I recognize that having a village or having the ability to create one is a privilege that not everyone may have. If you are one of the fortunate ones, you can be grateful but absolutely also make use of the resources you have without feeling guilty!

Some ways in which our village has helped us:

• Sitters: We’ve had a series of amazing sitters over the years who do school drop-offs that make morning meetings easier for us. Most also did laundry folding and putting away which is a chore Vamsi and I both hate and are bad at. Thanks to our sitters we’ve had periodic date nights that allowed us some much needed couples time together!

• Grandparents: So many childcare and household duties are easier and lighter when any of our parents (Saanvi’s grandparents) come over to stay with us. This also allows us some extra date nights and couples time.

• Friends: As first-gen immigrants with no family nearby, our friends are our extended family! Sleepovers, trips together and help during emergencies ranging from sickness to car trouble are all thanks to our friends.

• Co-workers: Yes that’s right. I’m adding co-workers here even though this post is about the not-work part of the work-life tapestry. So many times my co-workers have picked up the slack at work when I had to rush for a school emergency or stay home for sickness. Sometimes they have picked up extra work to let me enjoy as well - like handling critical exec reviews while I was on vacation. Great co-workers absolutely help outside of work with everything they do!

Something to note is you have to be intentional about building your village. Just like sponsorships, a village is built out of thousands of small and large gives and takes. It doesn’t happen overnight and it needs to be nurtured to be alive and healthy. We are part of the village too and pitch in any way we can to help all of the above folks.

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Weaving Work

Weaving the work portion of the work-life tapestry takes more mindfulness and intention. Here are a few principles that have helped here.

1. Design your Decade Destination

It helps to have a personal goal for yourself to stay motivated. I’ve found that a decade is a good timeframe over which to think of this question of “where do I want my career to go?” Why? Because a decade is not so short that you are caught up in what you are doing the next week or the next month and it’s not so long that you feel like you’ll never get there.

Here is an activity for you:
Write down your Decade Destination and send it to yourself in a series of 10 scheduled annual emails.

Receiving an email from your past-self is an interesting experience - it will make you feel proud of how far you’ve come but also keep you focused on how far you have to go.

2. Go above and beyond

Carla Harris says this in her sponsorship talk that your performance currency goes up every time you deliver above expectations. To deliver “above and beyond” you need to know what that looks like in your work context. Take the time to have these conversations with your managers and senior peers so you understand what “exceeds expectations” mean.

To have a good career you absolutely need many examples of going above and beyond. However, since this is a post about weaving a tapestry of work and life, this is where I’ll reference the Lower Your Expectations principle from the section above. Sometimes I lower life expectations as mentioned in that section but sometimes I lower my expectations at work.

Here are examples of times when I knew that I would deliver what was asked but I was not going to be racking up performance currency:

• The first year after having Saanvi when sleep was a luxury and I was adjusting to being a mom.

• The first term of MBA when I was still getting the hang of managing work and parenting with being a student.

• Shorter periods various times in my career when my bandwidth was affected by life events like losing a parent, immigration concerns, buying a house, pandemic, world news, etc.

3. Don’t lose the shine

Its only “work” if it feels like work. If you are always doing what you enjoy, you’ll feel like doing more! Read my post about how to keep your career sparkling by changing things up often.

Keep your career sparkling

4. Protect your time

Remember we are weaving a work-life tapestry over a long period of many years. Some parts of that tapestry will have more work than life and some will have more life than work. Its ok to lean one way or another as necessary. What you don’t want happening is always leaning in one direction in your entire tapestry!

My internal gauge is roughly a month. If I’ve spent a month heavily dipped in work - maybe because of a new job or a big critical launch or a series of unexpected outages - then I’ll try to switch gears and spend the next month leaning into the life side of my tapestry. That’s when I’ll take on some extra volunteering at school or plan some get-togethers with friends or perhaps that is a month with planned vacation already.

When you have heavily leaned in the work direction and need to change gears, prioritization and protecting your personal time becomes important. Letting your co-workers know when you’ll be taking time off or have reduced availability is important. Just as important is that you stick to your word and not try to answer work emails while spending time with your kid! Learning to compartmentalize and keep my focus on the activity at hand, especially for the most important ones that need my presence, has been a very difficult yet very rewarding life skill to learn! I’m still trying to master it but it has already helped me so much!

5. Complete the weave

Weaving in work and life for me also means being able to bring either on the other side as needed. Here are some ways I bring in my life side into work:

• My hobby making handmade cards has helped me be creative with work presentations and team activities that fostered connections.

• Motherhood has been the best leadership course for me so far. There are so many learnings I have carried over from parenthood to management!

• We often try to align family travel with work trips to make the best of both.

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Readers, how do you weave work and life together? Where you struggle while doing so?