It's Self Care Week: Katie on Work/Life Balance

When I was in high school, I remember being given the assignment of writing what I envisioned for the next five years of my future and the next ten years of my future. Mine went something like this:

Five Years:

• Have a college degree

• Get married

• Buy a house

Ten Years:

• Start a family

• Have a career

• Travel

 The essence of this being, I thought I was going to live out the so-called “American Dream.” Little did I know that college would mean a lifetime of debt, buying a house seems like only a dream, and starting a family is far more complicated than I ever could have imagined. Sixteen-year-old Katie didn’t know much about the world she was entering.

At present, I do have a college degree - in fact, I have two! I’m not married.  I’m not even close to that, I don’t even date. I have a career but I’m not as far along as I thought I might be and it certainly doesn’t pay me enough to buy a house or travel as much as I’d like to.

The truth is, my version of the “American Dream” anymore is to simply find work-life balance.

I never imagined that I’d have a career that expected 60-70 hour work weeks out of me. That leaves me very little time for anything else. The majority of “me-time” is found on Saturdays and Sundays after catching up on sleep. I look at coworkers that have families at home and I don’t even understand how they do it. Phone calls to their children to say ‘good night’ as they get tucked into bed. Raising children is a whole other full-time job. There are literally not enough hours in the day to make that work with my career right now. I can’t even get a dog.

But boy do I want one. I want a furry best friend to run with and cuddle. Every once in a while, I think “I’m just gonna do it! I’m gonna get a dog!” but it doesn’t take long to talk myself out of it and remind myself just how much that won’t work. It stinks to be honest.

I often find myself wishing for a regular nine to five job, just so that I could have time each day to spend on me, whether that’s through exercise, dating, having fun, or feeding my own creative passions. That’s the dream now.

On the same hand, I feel hungry within my career. It feels almost impossible to detach from it. I want to keep feeding that beast and I want to be a filmmaker. I want to direct and produce my own material and the only way to do that is to put in the hours (or get really lucky, but let’s not count on that).

So how do you balance it out then? How do you live your life while maintaining a career? I get why people don’t do these careers. Sometimes I think that it would be much better to do something easier just to have the other half of my life back. Call me crazy, I guess.

My own path to finding any resemblance of work-life balance is to keep a very specific calendar. I schedule my weekends and all of my free time, for that matter. That even includes scheduling time to do nothing. I will literally write in my calendar “do nothing.”

They say everyone is a flake in Los Angeles. That’s because it is all too common to have your plans with someone fall through. I never know if I’m going to actually hang out with someone until we’re actually hanging out. But I get it. Sometimes you have to say no. Sometimes you have to look at your day and just say “this is not what I need right now.”

That is one way that I maintain the balance as well. I say no. I try not to be a flake. If I make plans, I intend to keep them. However, there are times where my body or my brain is just not having it and I do have to cancel. Then there’s the game of not guilt-tripping myself about it. But that’s a whole other topic. The point here is that saying ‘no’ is important. Taking time to do nothing is important.

Maintaining balance means being constantly cognizant of your time and energy, it means being self-aware, and it means taking care of yourself.

There are a ton of great TED talks on the topic of work-life balance.

And for my own personal process, I use the Passion Planner to schedule my day to day. It’s effective for me and their website has all kinds of great advice and videos on how to manage your time.