Work/Life Balance

The importance of collaborating in work/life balance.

When I first started graduate school three years ago, I wanted to be as productive as a human being could be. By working non-stop, 7 days a week, 12 hours a day, for the first three months, I ended up not achieving much more than my colleagues were by working 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. I felt like Superman for a while, I could take an endless load of work as I was (still am) passionate about my research topic.

I realized how unhealthy that was when one day, at my parent's place, I could not even enjoy a glass of wine and listen to what my family was talking about without thinking about my experiments instead. It was hard to admit, but I was close to a «passionate» burn-out.

Last year I tried to organize a work-life balance workshop for the Botany conference for ERCs and I emailed a few panelists. One of them, who generously agreed to participate, also got back to me with a comment that I really got me to think a lot about the term "work-life balance", and I want to share it here with everyone as well:

"Now, work-life is maybe not the best term, since life is everything, work included.  Work-family is not a great term either because some people are single (but they might have extended family).  I don’t have a solution to this, but what we really are talking about is the work vs non-work balance, and that is especially difficult for academics I think to manage and navigate."

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