A New Recipe for Success
In January of 2021, Jaclyn Siegel wrote the perfect tweet to encompass the struggles of work-life balance in academia. She wrote “Academia: you must be brilliant, creative, and organized. You must do this while teaching 3-4 courses, writing grants, publishing manuscripts, mentoring students, reviewing papers, serving on committees, and presenting at conferences.” And almost offhandedly (in a sarcastic manner), she adds “Academia: And work-life balance is CRITICAL,” with critical in all caps.
We know that the academy loves to simultaneously glorify busyness and encourage work-life balance. We also know that the tasks of an academic become compounded by marginalization. Every six months, it seems, there is a headline about the extra burden that women faculty and faculty members of color face as they pursue their scholarly goals. This extra burden can reflect additional service, additional mental stress, and sometimes even physical violence that comes from being minoritized. Many scholars contend with these burdens because they have hope that by their presence and actions, they can improve the institutions that were not built with them in mind. And often, this work often begins well before we earn faculty positions.
Self-reflective moment. Are you involved in any campus organizations aimed at improving the academic experiences of other students on campus? When I reflect on this question, I realize that I was HEAVILY involved in a variety of student organizations for minoritized students when I was a graduate student at Harvard. My service included the Du Bois multicultural organization for five years, as well as the Harvard Black graduate student alliance and the LGBTQ+ for the graduate school of arts and sciences for three years, let alone my constant mentoring of queer students of color. This service work was valuable to me but did mean I had less time to do research, something my advisors noted time and time again. In short, there is simultaneously too much to do but very little time, AND prioritizing rest and wellbeing is more important than ever. This struggle is compounded for minoritized folks, as they are asked to do more which makes rest even more necessary to prevent burnout.
So how does one begin to balance this all out? One popular metaphor work-life balance as a juggling act. There are a whole bunch of things that we are supposed to be good at juggling, including health, research progress, love/romance, professional development, teaching, writing, family time, etc. We separate these balls into “Work” and “Life” and try to juggle all of them. The more balls in the air the better you are at work life balance. Folks extend this metaphor by saying that work is a rubber ball while the balls related to family, healthy, and friends are glass. If you drop the work ball it will bounce back but if you drop the glass balls they will be irrevocably scuffed and perhaps even shattered. I don’t know about you, but this is such a stressful way of approaching work and balance. There are so many things and to be worried that a mistake might cause irrevocable damage is a level of anxiety I refuse to accept.
Now… I believe a better way of thinking about work-life balance is like cooking. Think about making a Thanksgiving meal, or any sort of large communal meal with multiple dishes. What do you have in front of you to cook? Let’s start by cooking the dressing, which requires sautéing the onions, green peppers, and mushrooms. Sautéing requires intense focus and all of your attention. But once you add those ingredients together with the cornbread, creamed soups, and seasoning, the dressing just needs to be browned in the oven. You can prep it and forget about it until you’re ready. Any sort of greens that require potlickker can be prepped and simmered on the stove without much attention outside of an occasional stir and taste. Once you bake the dressing, you can set a timer to forget about it until you need to pull it out of the oven. In short, if you take a snapshot of your stove at any given time, NONE of your dishes are getting equal amounts of your attention like what is implied by the juggling metaphor. In fact, they SHOULD NOT get equal amounts; otherwise, you won’t be able to focus on cooking to allow all the food to come out hot at the same time. It is ok for you to give different dishes different amounts of time because they require different amounts of time! Balance is learning how to be effectively imbalanced in the moment but balanced over the course of the cooking prep. If you approach work-life balance in this way, there are some other nuggets we can derive.
First, what kind of cook do you want to be? What will be your specialty? Answering this question for yourself sets up proper expectations as to what you are supposed to be good at and what you can let be just ok. Academia can set up this unrealistic expectation that you are supposed to be good at everything, when in reality, most people are good at a few things and play to their strengths. Watching the Great British Bakery always highlights that fact for me. These are some of the best amateur bakers in the country and they routinely get flummoxed when asked to make puff pastry from scratch if they don’t specialize in patisserie. It isn’t worth it for them to learn how to make it; they just buy it from the grocery store and don’t feel bad about doing so! So, give yourself permission to focus on one or two aspects of academia that bring you the most joy and simply try your best at the rest. That is also true with the personal. I suck at showing up to events so I became really good at sending cards. Knowing what kind of cook you want to be also makes it easier to identify when you can say no to a request. Make sure your “yes”es align with your strengths, personal and professional.
Second, cooking large meals is a communal act. What are the dishes only you can make and also, who is helping you cook? As in many Black families, who makes the macaroni and cheese is a sacred dish. I am proud to be the mac and cheese maker for Thanksgiving, as my family have determined that the privilege of making it is on me. Thus, I don’t worry about making the mashed potatoes, as that is a dish anyone can make (although mine are fire). What about the things that you are balancing: What are the tasks that only you can do compared to the tasks that you can leave for others, even if you prefer the way you do them? Being able to distinguish where your expertise lies is one way to make sure you don’t end up with tasks not worth your time and energy.
The flipside of this focuses on who is helping you cook. Academia can be such an individualistic place, but in reality, that’s not true. It is ALWAYS communal, and the people who are able to pretend that it is not usually have hidden privileges and systems in place that confer the communality without being seen. As you practice your recipes and make your meals, make sure you have a community around you that tries your cooking, helps you prepare the food (so cooking goes faster!!) hypes you up, teaches you new (knife/life) skills, and eats the prepared food with you. The juggling metaphor implies you balance all alone and that’s not the best approach for most. Don’t juggle alone!
Third, being a good cook requires PRACTICE! If your recipe doesn’t turn out well the first time, there is no need for despair. You try again, changing up things until you get the recipe how you like it. And yet, in academia, we often feel the weight of every failure as if it is a personal failing. The things we have to do as an academic (think back to Jaclyn’s tweet) are all things that take less time and energy the more we do it. Thus, it is important that we allow ourselves the freedom to make mistakes and get better. That is also true for work-life balance. Practice allows you to judge what does and doesn’t require your attention. Remember when you were first learning how to cook, and you watched the water boil? You now know you do not have to do that, and that if the water boils down too low, you can just add some more. That knowledge that makes up “best practices” only comes from practice, so remember you will figure out what works for you if you simply just practice!
Relatedly, dishes rarely become “unsalvageable” immediately. Did you burn the rice a bit on the bottom? You scrape out the parts that are edible and throw out the burnt parts! No one needs to know about how you burned it a bit. Honestly, some people like the flavor of a bit of char. It can give a dish some character. There are only a few dishes that have narrow margins of error (think souffles and movement around a stove) where if you don’t do a task well or in a particular time frame, the whole thing is ruined. Most dishes can be salvaged throughout the whole process, and practice helps us become creative with what we can do. Cooking is mostly outcome focused, and work-life balance requires something similar. Rather than focusing on what we are “supposed to do”, we can focus on the outcome we wish to achieve and move accordingly. We can ask for those extensions so we can attend our friend’s birthday party or finish that paper a week later than anticipated due to unexpected setbacks. We don’t even have to announce that we are giving ourselves grace as we give some other important part of our lives attention. It is rare that our research trajectory will collapse completely because things were a few days late (this does not include hard deadlines, but hard deadlines are rare in academia).
Let go of making every dish perfect and remember, “food can be tasty and yet ugly to plate”. For example, the best dissertation is a done one. My dissertation was a bit of a hot mess and not the one I wanted to write, but it did its job. It got me out of grad school and propelled me into the faculty position I have now. Food is meant to nourish our bodies and can bring people together in community. The work we do in academia and in life have the same purpose. Focus on balancing the aspects of your life and academia that nourish you and get really, really good at making those recipes in tandem with each other. You will have a winning meal for success if you can do that!
About the Author
Sa-kiera T.J Hudson (but you can and should call her Kiera) is an Assistant Professor at the University of California Berkeley Haas School of Business. She received her PhD in social psychology and studies the psychological processes involved in how social hierarchies are formed, maintained, and intertwined. When not doing research, she enjoys eating her way through the Bay with her wife and two doodles, as well as making greeting cards and planners for fun (check out www.thelotplanner.com).
