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| © iStockphoto/Getty Images african american woman with baby girl working from home |
Julie Zhuo gets asked this question all the time. The Facebook VP is taking a new approach in how she .
As the vice president of product design at Facebook, Julie Zhuo
has a pretty public persona. And because she's a woman in leadership
who has children, she gets asked the same question. All. The. Time.
"How do you achieve work-life balance?" Short answer: Zhuo says she hasn't achieved it.
Though
she frequently gets asks this dreaded question -- most recently by a
high school student during a Q&A session -- she says it still stumps
her.
One reason is because she has a lot of hands-on support from her family and nanny, plus pays to outsource errands and chores to buy her time back.
Even
so, her days are a whirlwind. "Most evenings, my end-of-day routine
starts with a private lament that sounds something like this: "WHYYYYYYY
ISN'T THERE MORE TIME IN THE DAYYYYYY?!?!" Zhuo wrote.
No one has super-human abilities.
Zhuo wants to be
transparent about the support she receives and pays for, because she
feels that most people who seemingly have it all don't always
acknowledge it. She has a partner who shares the load at home, and a
successful career that pays a good salary, allowing her to hire extra
help.
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If Zhuo seems like she gets a lot done, that's because
she's not doing it alone. It's not because she's really good at making
lists and managing her time. (Though, admittedly, Zhuo is good at that, too.)
"I think it's important to debunk the myth that 'being productive' requires superhuman abilities," Zhuo explained.
Define your own balance.
But say you don't have a cushy salary and don't have a robust network of support. Does that mean you should just give up?
Not
at all. Zhuo still has some good advice for you. No matter what stage
you are in your career and life, she encourages you to get serious about
what balance means for you personally. Select a handful of priorities.
She recommends you keep it between three and seven.
This is similar to Randi Zuckerberg's approach.
She calls it the entrepreneur's dilemma: "Maintaining friendships.
Building a great company. Spending time w/family. Staying fit. Getting
sleep. Pick three."
Compare your priorities to reality.
Rank your priorities in order. Then, think about how you spent your time over the last month.
Compare
how you want to spend to your time to how you actually did spend your
time. If "rewatch all my favorite shows on Netflix this winter" didn't
make the cut of your life priorities, then it's time to slash your binge
watching.
Zhuo says once she started being more intentional in
how she spent her time, she had fewer of those freak-out moments about
not having enough of it. She also let other things go on her list that
she aspired to do one day, but weren't priorities.
How are you actually spending your time?
Time management expert Laura Vanderkam
agrees with this approach. She advises her clients, many of whom are
high-performing executives with busy professional lives and families, to
spend a week tracking their time in 30-minute chunks. It's usually an
enlightening exercise because people realize they waste time doing
things that don't always align with their priorities.
"We don't
build the lives we want by saving time," Vanderkam said on the TED
stage. "We build the lives we want, and then time saves itself."
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