Thoughts on work/life balance, at times when there is no balance

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Master class next Wednesday!

Guest instructor Ana Sofia Correia kicks off the T4T master class “school year” next Wednesday, September 24! Join us for Marketing with purpose: How medical translators and interpreters can attract the right clients. Registration is $75 and includes the recording; we have a big group signed up and there’s room for everyone who wants to join. 

This week’s topic: Balancing work and life, at times when there is no balance

If you’ve been freelancing for any amount of time, you’ve probably been through it: a phase of life (could be weeks, months, or years) when you’re aiming for work/life balance, and your life has absolutely no balance. 

For many of us, this happens when we’re in a significant caregiving role. I started freelancing when my about to be 23 year-old daughter was born, and I remember many nights when my final thought as I fell asleep would be something like, “If tomorrow goes really well, maybe I can cut my nails.” Entire facets of my life fell by the wayside: I’m a lifelong voracious reader, and it felt like years went by where I read “Hippos Go Berserk” (“A wild counting story about a hippo whose home is visited by first two hippos, then three, then four, until 45 hippos are partying all night long”) at least 1,782 times, and not much else. Things went similarly off the rails (minus the hippo book) during my husband’s two major health incidents (pacemaker, mountain bike accident; no relationship between the two!). And yet, I still think I made the right choices (for me) in those situations. 

A radically unbalanced time can take many forms: your own health crisis, an international move, a relationship breakup, a beloved pet’s health crisis, helping your aging parents, just any of the curveballs that life tends to throw our way. As freelancers, we’re in a unique position at these times:

• We often have the flexibility to keep working, at least part-time, during these unbalanced phases, and…
• At least in the U.S., we have no paid leave for these times, while we’re often called on to step in because of our flexible schedules, and we may financially need to keep working while juggling a lot of other things 

First, focus on choices and priorities

How do we maintain some semblance of sanity as freelancers, when things feel totally off the rails? And how do we know when we’re making the “right” choices for us and our businesses, when we’re in a really hard situation in life in general? These are really personal questions, but here are a few strategies I’ve developed, through more than a few unbalanced periods in almost 23 years of freelancing. 

Most importantly, to whatever extent you can, focus on your own choices and your own priorities, rather than what’s being thrust upon you (which is often a lot). This kind of reframe really helps me:

• “I usually stop working at 2 PM because I like picking my daughter up at school and spending the afternoon with her,” versus “I can’t work past 2 PM because I have to go get my kid.” 
• “My schedule is a little irregular right now because my husband’s having health issues and I want to go to the important medical appointments with him,” versus “I can’t really say from one day to the next what hours I’m going to be working because I never know how my husband is going to be feeling and he also can’t drive.” 

In these situations, I think we sometimes default to “can’t,” when we really should say, “choose not to.” I definitely could have put my daughter in an after school program or hired an after school babysitter; lots of people with young kids work until 5 or 6 PM, I just chose not to. And my husband is a full-grown adult who could have taken Uber to medical appointments and managed his health stuff on his own. That’s what people without a key support person do. But that’s not what I wanted for him or for my own role in the situation. 

So start there: focus on your priorities and your choices, rather than the constraints. 

Also, put all the options on the table

I use this strategy a lot in life in general. I think that one of the worst feelings in life is feeling stuck: as if you’re in a cruddy situation with no way out, which is rarely true. It can be a big help to lay out all the options, even if they seem weird, expensive, undesirable, or something else, because it helps you see that there are more solutions than you might think. Whatever your specific situation, maybe you can apply this type of thinking: 

• If you’re taking care of kids or aging parents, maybe you can hire a less expensive babysitter or caregiver who you wouldn’t necessarily leave alone with the kid(s)/parent(s), but who can hang out with them while you’re working at home. I know a few freelancer moms who did this: hired the neighbor’s 12 year old to play games with their kids for an hour or two after school. 
• Maybe you can give yourself a sanity window: decide that for the next month, you’re not working on Friday afternoons (or whenever). Then, you know that whatever else happens, you have that time to reclaim your sanity. 
• If you’re the one having the crisis (health, etc.), maybe, with your clients’ permission, you can outsource some of their work to a really trusted colleague so that you at least keep the clients. For example, I hire my own editors for a lot of my direct client work, and my clients know this. Maybe, in a pinch, the editors could translate and I could edit. Even if you had to forgo a lot of your profit margin, this would alleviate the fear of losing your clients entirely. 
• Maybe you could put some things in the “good enough is good enough” category. I actually do this fairly frequently with cooking dinner. I’m the main weeknight cook in our house (my husband is actually a better, but much slower cook than I am). I dislike takeout and food delivery for various reasons (expense, all the packaging), but I also like eating real meals, even when I’m having a crazy week. My go-to insta-meal is an enhanced Costco bag salad (take the bag salad and add some cherry tomatoes, avocado, whatever) topped with grilled meatless chicken breasts (meatless only because we’re vegetarians). This takes around 15 minutes to make, and it’s fine; it’s nothing elaborate, but it’s good enough. 

Review past unbalanced periods and what you would do differently 

Life just keeps on happening, and chances are that throughout your freelance career, you’ll go through periods when things feel very manageable and periods when things feel completely off the rails. The advantage (sort of?) is that you can learn from these experiences and apply the lessons to the next time. What, if anything, would you do differently? Of the available options, do you feel like you picked the best one for you? How can you get clearer on your own priorities for the next time?

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