“Summer Blowback”

While it may seem like I fell off the face of the earth for the past month, in fact I’ve been busy experiencing “summer blowback.” In other words, I’ve been doing all of the things I agreed to do this summer while dealing with my mom’s illness and death without thinking clearly about just how much I’d committed to! Thus the term, “summer blowback.” Lesson learned for the future. However, interestingly I’ve met other people who are dealing with their own version of summer blowback during the last two weeks of September through early October but for different reasons. Are you experiencing “summer blowback?” Let me know!

I may not have blogged in a couple of weeks, but a lot has been happening such as…

My New Fast Company Blog Goes Live!

My new weekly Work+Life “Fit,” Not Balance blog for Fast Company went live this week! My intention is to blog here and for Fast Company once a week and cross-link to both. I knew Fast Company would be a great partner to spread the work+life “fit” message back in October, 2004 when Keith Hammonds interviewed me for his provocative and controversial “Balance is Bunk,” article, so check it out. Continue Reading…

Today! I’m on the Radio! Tune in to Karen Salmansohn’s “Be Happy, Dammit” Show, Wed, September 12th from 8-9 am, hear me live on Lime channel 114, Sirius Satellite Radio. I will be joining a panel of experts to talk about women in the workplace. Along with me you will hear Marci Alboher, career columnist for the New York Times and author of “One Person/Multiple Careers;” Eve Tahmincioglu, Your Career columnist for MSNBC.com and author of “From the Sandbox to the Corner Office;” and Leslie Bennetts, author of “The Feminine Mistake.” Should be a great conversation—already the emails exchanging between us have been challenging and provocative!

I’m Live Blogging from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation/AWLP Working Retreat on Workplace Flexibility—Next Week 9/16, 9/17, 9/18!

Join me real-time as I share my experiences at this unprecedented national gathering of the top workplace flexibility experts in Park City, Utah sponsored by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and Alliance of Work-Life Progress. This meeting will bring together professionals from the different sectors pursing workplace flexibility innovations: corporate leaders, higher education leaders and consultants like me who support the flexibility efforts of both the private sector and educational organizations.

The goal of this meeting is as follows:

“The objective of this get-together is for private sector employers and institutions of higher education to come together for the first time to share challenges and advances in their efforts to create optimally flexible work environments. This exchange is designed to help both sectors achieve faster progress, the proceedings of which will result in the publication of a “Flexibility Compendium.”’

Why Should Everyone Know and Care about This Meeting? Continue Reading…

First, let me spread some blog love: Welcome, Kathie Lingle, Executive Director of the Alliance for Work-Life Progress to the blogosphere with her new blog. Her knowledge and experience is on display full force in her posting this week where she challenges the reality of the “opting-out” trend with an abundance of research to the contrary. And she warns (as I have many times) that perpetuating the myth actually hurts the very women it is supposedly trying to help. Welcome Kathie!

On this Father’s Day, let’s hear it for the men. More research proves, once again, that combining work and life is an issue for everyone. Not just women:

• An important article appeared recently inside the first section of The New York Times (unfortunately not the front page), entitled “Signs of Détente Between Venus and Mars” regarding a number of academic, peer reviewed studies in which men and women reported increasingly similar levels of concern related to work and life.
• Monster.com just released a survey where 58% of fathers felt their employers should be more considerate of their needs as working dads, and a majority appreciate having a flexible work schedule.

The fact is men are part of the debate and more are making their unique voices heard in blogs and books, including: Continue Reading…

Note from Cali: As many of my regular readers know, sadly, my mother is in the last stages of her fight with lung cancer. One way I am adjusting my work+life fit is to draw upon the expertise of some wonderful experts and writers who will appear periodically as guest bloggers.

This week please welcome Jill Tipograph, founder/director of Everything Summer , who describes her business as “the only independent resource to which discerning families can turn for unbiased summer planning guidance.” Jill will offer some great tips on summer planning from her book, Your Everything Summer Guide & Planner . Take it away Jill!

Even though summer is officially less than a month away, parents can still maximize great experiences for their kids and teens. Plus, wise parents use the current summer to start thinking about next year’s summer, since quality camps and programs do fill early. Here are some shortcuts to help busy families make the right summer plans for their kids… Continue Reading…

Last Call!!! Tuck Business School/Aquent/Work+Life Fit Survey: Please take a minute to complete one or both of the following brief surveys studying new career paths from both the individual and corporate perspectives—Deadline, Thursday, April 19th (to learn more please click here )

Corporate Hiring Manager Survey Link
Individual Survey Link

Incentive Magazine Q&A – Check out my interview with Editor-in-Chief, Joe Kornik. We spoke while I was driving (talking on my hands free headset) to meet my mother at a doctor’s appointment and his wife was getting ready to have a baby any minute. A perfect work+life fit scenario!

Now back to the blog….

While I know the question, “How do we work and have a personal life in a 24/7, high tech, global work reality?” affects everyone, I can still be surprised by the scope and reach of the issue. My most recent surprise was this email from a professor in academic medicine from a major teaching institution: Continue Reading…

One of the many reasons I started this blog was to share the important and interesting work being done by the dedicated professionals in the Work-Life field. Unfortunately, much of this work is never covered by the mainstream media. Yet it ultimately influences how we collectively combine work and life. So I love passing it along!

One of the most innovative work-life think tanks in the field is the Center for Work and Family (CWF) at Boston College. Under its Director, Brad Harrington, the CWF oversees a number of innovative work-life research initiatives.

On September 26th, CWF launched their most recent innovation: the Boston College Global Workforce Roundtable (GWF). I recently spoke with CWF’s Kathy Lynch, the force behind the GWR, about the kick-off meeting in London which was hosted by GlaxoSmithKline. I asked her to share what she thought were the most interesting results of this meeting: Continue Reading…

In Newsweek, check out my advice for moms who want to start their own business in order to work, and have more flexibility. “Working for myself” can sound like a good option, and I do hear it quite frequently from people (not just mothers) searching for a better work+life fit. But I often wonder if it isn’t sometimes a default option—“since I don’t think I can have work+life flexibility working for someone else, I’ll work for myself.”

While I believe there’s a lot more flexibility in our current jobs than we realize, there are a couple of important truths to consider before you decide to work for yourself as a way to find a better work+life fit: Continue Reading…

Often you can find your “fit” not by doing less work, but by working differently. However, there may be certain work+life transitions that require you to reduce the hours you work and the amount of work you do for a period of time. The question then becomes, “How can I work ‘part-time’”? I’m going to share some strategies for making that shift in a way that considers your needs as well as the need of your job:

• Thinking of it as a “reduced schedule”
• Partnering with your current employer
• Using a “part-time” job placement company Continue Reading…

Because the recent debate regarding mothers and work has focused on mothers who “opt out,” or mothers who’ve left the workforce and want to get back in, it’s perpetuated an assumption that most mothers would prefer not to work after having children.  The problem is that it’s not true.

Yes, having children causes every mother (and many fathers, for that matter) to reevaluate the role work plays in their lives.  Some mothers will choose to step out of the workforce.  But lost in the debate is the fact that, for many mothers, their personal and professional realities support a decision to work full-time, either because they have to or want to.  Yet this assumption that “mothers don’t work” causes these full-time working mothers to not only experience personal doubts about their choice even though everything is fine at home and at work, but to feel judgment from others.   Continue Reading…

Last week I traveled to Wisconsin to present the Career Asset Management Model (CAM) with Mike Haubrich, the financial planner who developed it. Here’s what makes it unique:

• Identifies your career as a valuable asset that needs to be as actively managed as an investment portfolio.
• Integrates the Work+Life “Fit” process into the traditional financial planning model.
• Creates a partnership between planners and career coaches which currently doesn’t exist.

The CAM model helps planners assist their clients in creatively and flexibly managing their career through critical work+life transitions as part of their overall financial strategy. The Work+Life “Fit” process is the tool within CAM that facilitates the creation, negotiation and implementation of a particular “fit” to suit a client’s current realities (See my interview with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel 5/9/06). Continue Reading…