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1、Balance It OutBy GRETA BENNETTCATALYSTCareer advice for scientistsI really dislike the phrase work/life balance. Just look at it: Work and Life (which arent mutually exclusive, by the way) are in a stubborn deadlock, pushing up against one another in a heated battle. Work appears to be tipping the b
2、arrier that separates them in its favor, pushing Life (and Balance) out of the way and vying for more than its fair share of your precious time.And Balance is way off by itself, completely unconnected to (and mostly ignored by) Work and Life, who just keep fighting with each other but never really a
3、chieve anything resembling Balance.I am one of the X-Gals, as we call ourselves, an informal group of nine female biologists who began meeting in 2000 and have since been on a mission of friendship and support as we pursue careers in academic science. We are taking turns writing a monthly column abo
4、ut the conversations we have had as women in the sciences. Not surprisingly, we have talked about balance a lot over the years.Until becoming an X-Gal, I hadnt really thought consciously about balance in my own life. It wasnt until the fall semester of the final year of my doctoral program, when I w
5、as eight months pregnant, writing a postdoctoral grant, preparing to be a teaching assistant for a course taught by my major adviser, and trying to write up my dissertation, that I suddenly realized that I was going to have to start taking the issue of balance very seriously.That last year was mostl
6、y a blur, and my life was about as exhausting and unbalanced as it can get. Yet the experience only hardened my desire to find a reasonable balance as I began my career in biological research.So I came up with a plan. I deliberately applied for my own postdoctoral grant to do research in a carefully
7、 chosen foreign academic environment that was not as inherently all-consuming as I perceived academic science in the United States to be.My strategy worked: I got the postdoc grant, and my husband, infant son, and I moved overseas. I was able to pursue the research I love, and because I brought with
8、 me my own ideas and grant, I was largely independent and able to set my own hours, which, in turn, allowed me to have a family-friendly work schedule.My postdoc is now over. My son is 3, my husband and I have bought a house, and I have started a new full-time research position (also overseas).Most
9、important, I have made significant strides toward experiencing balance in my life on a regular basis (really!), but it is a constant, conscious effort. I probably have a lot of things in my favor in that regard: a husband with a flexible schedule who works from home and takes on many child-care and
10、housework responsibilities, a support network made up of X-Gals and lab mates, the flexibility that the academic environment offers, supportive supervisors.But other aspects of my situation are not so ideal: a location far from family, a litany of child-care waiting lists, a baby who would not take
11、a bottle (ever).Perhaps my biggest obstacles have been, and continue to be, internal ones: changing my own unrealistic expectations that I should be working more (currently 40 to 50 hours a week) and finding fulfillment in what I have achieved instead of finding failure in what I havent.My guess is
12、that most female scientists who are early in our careers could put together a list of things that help or hinder our ability to balance work and life. (My own list of things that have helped includes yoga: the way that you aim for equilibrium in each of the yoga postures, pushing yourself to the lim
13、it but not over the edge. Achieving a mind-body balance during the practice mirrors, for me, the whole work/life conundrum.)Regardless of our specific circumstances, we can all make a few simple yet deliberate changes in our lives and attitudes that will move us beyond the clichd struggle for work/l
14、ife balance and put us all firmly on the road to true balance in our lives. The following list of tips from the X-Gals seems like a good place to start:Write Down a Plan and Stick to It.In any given week, most of us have multiple projects, grants, experiments, classes, and other work to manage. It i
15、s easy to procrastinate or, worse, become completely paralyzed and unable to move forward. So write down your major goals for each current project. Then write down reasonable ways to achieve them on a monthly, weekly, and even daily basis. Then collate all of that information into a weekly to-do lis
16、t.At the end of each week, take stock of what you have (and havent) accomplished. Go home on Friday knowing what you have accomplished and ready to jump right in to work on Monday morning with a new list of tangible weekly goals.We X-gals have found that posting our goals on a weekly basis to our e-mail group helps keep us accountable and on track. We started doing that while finishing our dissertations (whoever didnt meet their goals bought t
