In the halls and offices of Corporate America, HR directors and other managers talk about the importance of work/life balance and come up with different slogans and posters. Yet at the end of the day, most professionals are working 50 to 60 hours a week in the office, some worse than that. Add on your commute time and the work you do at home and pretty soon you're over 70 hours a week!
How are you supposed to balance your life with that?
In my opinion, you can't.
In my last corporate job, my commute was an hour and a half each way. Since both my husband and I worked in the city, we would wake our then infant son at 5:30 am to get him dropped off at daycare by 6:15 am. We would then work until 5 pm, hopefully get to daycare by 6:30 pm to pick up our son, and arrive home 20 minutes later. After getting changed and making & eating dinner, we would have about an hour to spend with our baby before his bath at 8:30 pm and he was asleep by 9 pm.
What kind of life was that? All we were doing was giving our son a place to sleep.
It was at this point we decided to make a change, that the life we were living was not the life we wanted for our family. I had known for a couple years that I wanted to start a consulting firm, so it didn't take long for me to write up my business and marketing plan. Two short months later, I left my corporate job and became self-employed. (More on that in another post) During naptimes, I ran my consulting firm emailing prospects and scheduling client calls; while my child was awake, I was just mommy. Within 18 months, I was generating more revenues than I had earned as a salary. The best part, was I did almost all my work during naptimes and at night after my children were asleep. On those few occasions when I had to be at a client's office, my children had play dates at a friend's house or spent time with their Pappy.
This was more of a life. This is my desire for you. That you can take your children to the park on a Tuesday morning, teach them how to bake cookies, or just fly a kite on a Wednesday afternoon. The first step is deciding that you want more than just work/life balance, that you want a life.
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