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Work-life boundary

Yesterday I went to to a talk by ?pela Trefalt about her doctoral research on how large law firm attorneys deal with work-life boundary issues. She studied seventy people at an AmLaw 100 firm, about half men and half women. She found that one the attorneys' biggest concerns about work-life balance was jeopardizing their relationships at work.

She reviewed some of the strategies people used when their work and life conflicted. They ranged from just ditching work to silently accepting the work and complaining about it later. Not surprisingly, the most successful strategy was to set clear boundaries in advance and keep open communication. The part that was somewhat surprising was that people reported that this actually strengthened their work relationships, possibly because of the mutual trust required for the arrangements to work. Unfortunately, this was only true of established relationships. With new relationships, the outcomes tended to be worse, which seems inevitable.

All of this seemed to be pointing to something I've heard over and over at work-life discussions in school: work really hard and establish yourself first, so that you can earn flexibility with the reputation you've built. At this point, I always think to myself, this is not an option for me. I will make my own way, setting boundaries up front and establishing myself as I go along, and relying on the quality of my work. If I can't find a balance I can live with at the large law firm, then I will find a different direction for my career.

Lag Liv is in the same position, and wrote a fantastic post today about this very issue: "Living the work-life balance I want from the beginning may affect my partnership track, but it also means that I'm building a law practice on (mostly) my terms and one that is sustainable with the family life I want."

Here's the good news. Somebody asked Professor Trefalt, "What if you have significant commitments outside of work from the beginning?" She said that only two of the people in her study started out with significant commitments. Unlike the others, who went the route of killing themselves for three years to establish their reputations, these two set boundaries from their first day at the firm. But she said that they ended up being more successful at maintaining those boundaries. The others, who most often had some major life event like severe illness in the family or a new child, went through a bumpy transition period when the people they worked with were upset that they were no longer available at all hours and suddenly had new limitations. So there's a ray of hope for all us MILPs.

Full post as published by Magic Cookie on October 30, 2008 (boomark / email).