Balancing Work and Family is Not a Zero Sum Game
How to use goals to prioritize your life
One question I am often asked by friends and co-workers is how I balance my life as a startup CEO and as a father of three young children.
Balancing implies a zero sum game, yet we see that there are many people who are highly successful at work and are great parents. There are also people who can’t hold down a job and are terrible parents. Doing better at home doesn’t necessarily mean doing worse at work and vice versa, so we need to reframe the question.
At the heart of the matter is not balance but whether we are being successful as a parent
This leads to an even tougher question:
How do you know if you are being a successful parent?
Managing career and family all comes down to goals, which is something we establish in the workplace but most of us neglect when it comes to family.
In this post I will share my approach to managing a demanding career and a happy home by establishing family goals. This helps break out of the zero sum game “balancing” mentality and puts priorities in order.
If you are the kind of person who enjoys applying frameworks to solving problems, you will enjoy this approach.
Have you ever worked in an organization without clear goals?
Have you observed how office politics becomes elevated as people without meaningful goals find petty things to fight over? Or how people begin working on diverging and sometimes contradictory directions? Lastly, have you ever observed how the lack of measurable goals lends mere time at work to become proxy for how hard one is working?
Lack of goals is detrimental to an organization because without clear objectives people will find unproductive ways to measure their success, such as time. Your family is also an organization, and it is no exception.
Setting family goals is the first step
How do you know if you are a successful parent? That is a subjective question since everyone may have a different definition for success, but at the very least you should have one for yourself. Long term success is rarely enjoyed by stumbling forward without goals.
Most of us are unfortunately familiar with what happens in an organization without clear goals, so let’s take a moment to consider the same effect within a family.
Avoid conflating time with family as being a successful parent
Would you describe the following as good parenting goals?
- Attend every child’s sporting event
- Be home for every dinner
- Take at a two week vacation with the family each year
The above are good parenting practices, but I want to challenge your thinking on whether they are actually good goals. They are about spending time and lack context for what you hope to achieve with that time.
You would never set the following goals for yourself at work, would you?
- Attend every meeting in the company
- Be in the office for every lunch
- Take a two week trip with management each year
I’m certainly not discouraging anyone from spending more time with their family. That is a good practice. However, I am highlighting that one should not confuse the mere act of spending time with kids as parenting success, just like merely attending every meeting at the office is not an indication of work success.
Let’s say you spend all of Saturday with your kids but you’re checking your phone every 15 minutes. What if you’re not fully present and engaged? What if you’re just in the background? How much are you teaching your kids about life? How much are they growing and bonding with you?
These are qualitative questions which are hard to answer, so many people may fall back on the much easier question of just looking at time put in. This is counterproductive at work and not ideal within a family either.
Parents without clear parenting goals often use time with their kids as a proxy for successful parenting. They may also feel unnecessarily guilty for not spending more time, even though time is not the right variable to track
While time spent on things correlates with success, time should not be a goal in and by itself. There are days I spend just 30 minutes with my children but we make a major breakthrough. There are also days that we spend 6 hours together and I don’t think they gained much of anything from it.
Choosing goals for your family
Where do you want your family to be in 2, 5, or 10 years? Family goals may include things like how many children you want, their desired environment, lifestyle, values, education, and what trips you want to take together.
These decisions need to be made before you can decide on your own parenting goals.
Choosing goals for yourself
Besides setting broader family goals, you should set parenting goals for yourself so you can be proactive in your contribution rather than just reacting to the present situation.
Since you are a leader of your family organization, let’s look at how a leader of any organization may decide where to invest her effort:
- What is the most important need of the organization at this time?
- What problems will others be able to solve on their own?
- What problems is she uniquely positioned to solve?
A business CEO won’t spend all her time on strategy and zero time on marketing. She will however identify and focus on one area she can have the biggest impact at any given time. Similar to a CEO, parents can also add value in many areas but should recognize the one area that they are uniquely positioned to add maximum value at any given time.
What kinds of goals can parents focus on?
- Provide love and affection; giving lots of positive reinforcement and creating opportunities for special moments
- Provide resources; bringing in sufficient income so that the family can have a safe and healthy lifestyle
- Manage the environment; making sure your kids are in a good school, that the house is in good shape, the right day care, etc.
- Manage the daily details; such as grocery shopping, errands, and getting the kids to and from Tae Kwon Do
- Transmit character and values; teaching and embedding one’s children with strong moral values and character in line with your own ideals
The goal I choose to focus on
While my wife and I contribute to all the above, we divide the focus. She does more of #4 while I do more of #3. Similarly, she is very focused on #1 while I am very focused on #5, although we clearly do both.
Through evaluating what I believe is the most important present need of the family, what contributions others already bring forward (such as my wife and extended family), and where I am most uniquely positioned to help, I have made a conscious decision to focus on #5; the transmission of character and values. This is particularly important given the young age of my kids.
The values and character traits I’m focusing on are independence, leadership, integrity, resiliency, initiative, and curiosity.
I may spend only 20 minutes in the morning with my kids but I’ve set up that time to be high quality time. We are all at the breakfast table at the same time and discuss how our prior day went, how we applied our values, and how we will face challenges in front of us the coming day. The time may be brief but it is focused and with a purpose, and I believe serves our goals better than an hour spent hurrying together before a day.
I describe some of my other methods in this post: How to Raise Happy and Entrepreneurial Children.
Mapping out your next steps
If I believe I am being successful as a parent based on the goals I set then I can in good conscious focus my remaining energy on whatever else I prioritize. I am not troubled by thoughts of whether I need to be home more or less, or whether a peer is spending more or less time with their kids. I don’t measure my own success on an artificial clock set by people around me or society’s expectations. Setting goals allows me to think and plan independently.
Here is a workflow for you to go through:
If you ended up in:
- Box 1: You have the best result. Go forth and do good.
- Box 2: Invest in improving the quality of your time together. With clear goals, you at least have a starting point and direction to follow.
- Box 3: If you are certain that lack of time is really the problem, then there are no magical solutions to balance work and family. You already know the answer. Your family needs you.
If you are in box 2 and not sure what you can change, you are not alone. It took me a long time to figure out techniques and I’m far from having it all figured out. I write about some techniques here, and some I will publish in the future if there is interest. Others you can surely find on your own once you know what your goals are.
Just establishing clear goals and working on achieving them will reduce the anxiety associated with how much time one spends at home. It changes the question.
Instead of comparing and “balancing” work and family life, focus on the quality of your time with your family and whether you are being successful as a parent.
In Summary
- Balancing two things implies a zero sum game. Break out of this mindset and create goals for your family just like you do for the rest of your life.
- Do not judge yourself on the amount of time you spend at work or at home and don’t compare to others. Focus on whether you are accomplishing the goals you set for your family.
- To achieve your goals, you can either improve the quality of your time or increase the quantity of time at home. Improving quality first is always a good idea because any subsequent time increase amplifies your investment.
How you spend your time is usually more important than how much time you spend
