Balancing a budding career with a busy home life is a challenge for men and women alike. Whether you’re trying to fit family time in around project deadlines or pursuing your hobby on your lunch break, navigating the roles and responsibilities in your work and life spheres can leave you feeling frazzled. The competing voices of work and life have been characterized as tension and conflict, a metaphorical balancing act. Advice from peers and experts suggest many different ways of handling the pressures that weigh on us – the guilt from missing family time when you work late or the work project niggling the back of your mind while watching your child’s soccer game. Too often, we start to believe that the competing demands on our time and attention can never be resolved, but the resolution comes as a process of self-discovery.
Work-Life Styles
While it’s tempting to look for a one-size-fits-all solution, research shows that discovering your work-life style, and operating within it, may make the difference between experiencing work-life stress or work-life harmony. Two main work-life styles have been identified: Segregation and Integration. While it’s helpful to explore them as two distinct styles, they are more like ends on a continuum. Chances are good that your ideal work-life style has elements of segregation and integration in just the right proportions for your unique context.
Your style is shaped by several factors, including your personality, life stage, and work requirements. For example, individuals who work in shifts, such as healthcare providers and law enforcement, may use segregation strategies. Conversely, people whose work is less time bound, such as business managers and consultants, may gravitate toward integration strategies. The goal is to embark on a process of self-discovery that accounts for the factors in your situation and creates the right fit for you to inhabit both work and life spheres with energy and authenticity.
When using a segregation style, work and life activities are highly compartmentalized to keep them separate from one another. The notion of spillover comes from the segregation perspective in which work must be guarded against infringing on life and life must be prevented from interfering with work. In reality, these spheres do not operate in neat packages that can be perfectly separated from one another, but the principle of segregation can be a winning strategy for setting clear boundaries around the important activities of work and life to ensure neither sphere asserts a monopoly over your time and attention.
The integration stylerecognizes the inherent overlap between work, family, community, and other meaningful areas of life. This perspective capitalizes on the whole person approach to moving fluidly between diverse roles and responsibilities. The challenge lies in the crossovers between each sphere, but the benefits of increased time flexibility and the ability to take a non-traditional approach to arranging work and life activities together can make integration a success.
The work-life style that fits you best may be segregation or integration or somewhere in between. Here’s a handy chart to help you discover your work-life style.
| Find your style | Segregation Strategies | Integration Strategies |
| What type of work do you do? | If you work in shifts that are highly time- bound, keeping clearly defined work and life time blocks allows youto enjoy meaningful quality time in satisfying quantities at the office and at home, like shutting off your work phone when you leave the office so you can devote your attention to friends and family. | If your work projects have timelines withoutdefined shifts, then moving between work roles and life roles throughout your day keeps you engaged in all types of daily activities from meeting with your boss to seeing your kids off at the school bus stop. |
| What’s your life stage? | If you’re managing activities that have routine schedules, then allocating your time in clearly markedsegments can help you stay on track. | If you may be needed at unpredictable times or during standard work hours, then intertwining work andlife activities may give you the best of both worlds. |
| How do you function best? | If you prefer structure,then setting clear transition points between work and life may help you shift roles at appointed times and be fully present at home and atwork. | If you’re looking for flexibility, then treating every work orlife activity as part of your wholistic identitymay help you achieve fluid transitions between what you do for work and what youdo in life. |
| In a perfect world, what would make your work and life better? | If you long to leave work at the office and focus on family at home, then set strict hours for work and abide by them so spillover is less likely to creep into your schedule. | If you wish you had more freedom to fit work in around your family or check on your family during work hours, then integrating activities from both spheres might be the way to achieve the flexibility you need. |
Work-life Styles in Action
Meet Kristen. As a busy professional and part-time graduate student, she wrestles with meeting the demands of her job and her classes while still finding time for her family and community. When she snatches time in the evenings to do homework or catch up on work projects, she resents the time away from her family and saying no to community events. For Kristen, improving her work-life intersections means protecting personal and family time with clear boundaries around her work and class time. The segregation strategy allows her to devote herself to work when she’s at work and to be present with her husband and kids when she’s at home.
Meet Andy.Despite doing what he loves for work and volunteering in his community, Andy often finds himself running between roles – leaving work in the afternoon to pick his kids up from school then spending time on a work project at home after the kids go to sleep. Work activities are not limited to the office and evenings are not strictly reserved for family. Instead, he moves between each activity with purpose throughout his day. Integration strategies give Andy the flexibility and control he needs to make it all work together.
What work-life style do you prefer? How do segregation or integration strategies help you manage work and life?
