Try Giving Your Spouse Authority Over Your Work/Life Balance
If you’re worried that you’ll make the wrong choice in prioritizing work over family, perhaps it’s best to leave the duty of maintaining your work/life balance to someone else. That’s the advice of Sam Bahreini of the Young Entrepreneur Council in a piece published at TIME. Bahreini has had good results entrusting the decision to his wife. If she feels he’s crossed the line by taking too many business calls during family time or missing events for work, she lets him know and he defers to her judgement.
Many business lifers look back on their careers and wishes they had done a better job of spending time with their family. Yet with the growing demands that accompany an ambitious career, it’s getting harder and harder to turn off work mode and switch to the mom/dad setting. That’s why Bahreini explains why you need an ally to help make these decisions. As your spouse is one of the people most affected when you choose work over home, it makes sense for them to be that ally:
“When I get so focused on work that I start to drift away from my family, she pulls me back in—and I let her.
We often say a good business is “like a family,” but remember that like a family is not the same thing as having a family. No business should replace your actual spouse and kids.”
Read more at TIME
Photo credit: Sergey Nivens / Shutterstock
In the following clip from his Big Think interview, SAP CEO Bill McDermott explains why the best executives are the ones who put family first:
