Skip to content

Culture & Religion — December 5, 2014

Try Giving Your Spouse Authority Over Your Work/Life Balance

Worried about falling into a habit of prioritizing work over family? Sometimes what you need is an ally to hold your leash and make sure you don’t stray away from moments you won’t want to miss.

Robert Montenegro

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:

Related

a computer generated image of a human brain.

The great free will debate featuring Michio Kaku and Steven Pinker

Who — or what — really controls your mind?

Building destroyed by the Halifax Explosion. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C.

The largest accidental explosion of all time

More than a century ago, Halifax suffered an accidental blast one-fifth the size of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

a collage of photos of a man with a hat and a book.

6 great books with wildly unreliable narrators

Dive into the twisted truths and concealed realities told by literature’s most unreliable narrators.

a group of five matches on a pink background.

Signs you’re burned out — and how to bounce back

If you don’t feel better after the weekend, the “burnout paradox” could explain why.

▸

7 min

—

with

jwst Abell 2744 450 million

Starts With A Bang

The trick to instantly identifying JWST images

If you can identify a foreground star, the spike patterns are a dead giveaway as to whether it’s a JWST image or any other observatory.

Up Next

Politics & Current Affairs

What Does “No Justice, No Peace” Really Mean?

With the second non-indictment of a white police officer who killed an unarmed black man in two weeks, the chant “no justice, no peace” continues to ring out in protests around the country. What does that phrase really mean — and how has it been used historically, in protest movements both peaceful and otherwise?