Work-life balance

Sometimes what you need to maintain work-life balance is to make a trade-off between two different kinds of work. My posts here on this blog have slowed considerably since sometime before Christmas. I went from averaging three posts a week [...]

For companies both large and small, flexibility is the holy grail of employee benefits. The good news for employers stymied by the Recession, and not in the position to be giving out raises and bonuses, is that offering flexibility can [...]

There’s nothing like sorting through the mail and finding an unexpected check. Twice a year, I’m paid royalties by Andrews McMeel for a book I wrote years ago. You never know what idea is going to pop. But I will say, getting paid over and over again for something you did years ago never gets old.

Even if you have fabulous office space and enjoy going in every morning to be surrounded by your crackerjack staff, it’s not a bad idea to maintain a functional home office as well. I’ve spent most of this week in that home office, thanks to the swine flu.

“My business seems to be successful,” said the new entrepreneur, “but when do I get to quit worrying about enough work coming in?”
“Never,” was all I could tell her. In my years of running my own companies, I’ve been able to come to a strange peace with that fact, but some days it requires a certain amount of zen not to completely freak ou

The military seems to have adapted fairly well to women serving alongside men, just as the workplace has over the past several decades. “Motherhood, though,” says the writer of the article, Lizette Alvarez, “poses a more formidable challenge for the armed forces.” The corporate world is also still struggling with how to accommodate motherhood. Many mothers leave their corporate positions when they can’t reconcile the demands of their work calendar with their kid’s schedules.

Maggie would really rather be at home with her new baby, but went back to her job after a standard maternity leave because she and her husband decided they couldn’t afford for her not to work. Several months into it, she’s figured out that after paying for childcare and other expenses associated with the job, she nets about $300 a month. Is there not a better way to make $300? Like starting a company that would only need to net $3,600 a year to replace her job earnings?

It’s hard for entrepreneurs to take a break. For one thing, we tend to be excited about our work, so it’s not like we hate going into the office. For another, when we’re rolling ahead with some real momentum, it’s hard to even see that we could benefit from some stillness. But some of the best ideas come when you slow down

I’ve just discovered Judy Martin, who seems like a kindred spirit in the area of work-life balance. She’s also an Emmy award-winning journalist with 2o years of broadcast news under her belt. She now writes and speaks about the merging of the working and living experience. Judy posted a great review yesterday of my “Hell Yes” book in her blog at Work Life Nation.

I’m a big fan of every working person starting a small business as a Plan B — even if they’re gainfully employed at a rock-solid company. Just in case your job suddenly went away, you’d already have that Plan B company in place and making a little revenue. You might decide to ramp it up into a full-time endeavor. Or you might just be extra grateful for that non-salary income while you’re looking for the next job.