Baylor 2012
Geoff Moore
Dr Dawn Carlson
Dr Blaine McCormick
Dr Patricia Norman
Healthcare
Luncheon
What's Happening

Baylor faculty member is co-developer of five balancing strategies

All the world’s a stage, we’ve been told. And on that stage, all of us are jugglers. We’ve become adept at pleasing the boss and serving our customers, motivating our co-workers, meeting deadlines, launching new projects while finishing others, commuting to work but finding time to spend at home, donating to charities but saving for retirement, spending time with the kids and performing community service. Cooking, washing the car, grocery shopping, taking out the trash, fixing the leaky faucet. The more balls we manage to keep moving through the air, the more new ones life keeps throwing at us.

Most people accept juggling as a necessity. But others have discovered how to move beyond juggling in order to diminish exhaustion and frustration and find enrichment. Beyond Juggling: Rebalancing Your Busy Life is the title of a book of which Baylor’s Dawn S. Carlson is a co-author, along with Kurt Sandholtz, Brooklyn Derr and Kathy Buckner. The result of a three-year study involving hundreds of participants, Beyond Juggling (Berrett-Koehler Publishers; ISBN 1576751309) presents strategies that people can use to extricate themselves from the juggling juggernaut. Carlson, an assistant professor of management specializing in organizational behavior, says that the success of individuals in achieving balance between their careers and the personal aspects of their lives can have significant bearing on their job performance.

Carlson was a member of the faculty at the University of Utah when she began discussing the concept of juggling with Derr of Brigham Young University, career-development consultant Buckner and former Wall Street Journal writer Sandholtz, who had begun working for a business consulting group in Provo, Utah. When Carlson and her colleagues began research, they underestimated how universal juggling has become among people immersed in careers. “We really made a very conscious effort to find people of different economic levels and age groups and different life stages, because that plays a key role as well, if you have young children versus if you have an empty nest,” explained Carlson. “We were surprised to find that everybody juggles as a primary strategy for achieving balance. Rich, poor, old, young, male, female. That’s why my other three co-authors and I tried to focus on beyond juggling.” The result was their identification of five strategies: alternating, outsourcing, bundling, techflexing and simplifying.

• Alternating is a strategy under which spouses switch career roles, one being the predominant bread-earner for an extended period, and then taking a subordinate role to the career pursuits of the other spouse. For example, a mother might accept a low-demand job to spend time home with her children while they’re young. Then as she resumes pursuit of her career, her husband might begin a home-based consulting business, enabling him to be at home when the adolescent children arrive from school.

• Outsourcing involves delegation of time-consuming tasks that may not be cost-effective for a career individual to perform. Functions that can be outsourced include laundering, housecleaning, cooking, yard maintenance, even hiring someone to drive the kids to soccer practice after school, thereby allowing spouses to spend more time together and with their family members.

• Bundling is engagement in a fewer number of select activities that serve multiple purposes. For example, a parent who performs a 4-H community service project with her child is not only spending supervised time with her child, but also teaching moral and civic values while performing deeds for the public good. “People may get involved in church for friendship and social activities as well as a religious experience or participation in service projects,” Carlson observed.

• Techflexing involves application of technology to work more efficiently or streamline personal tasks. “Approaches involve taking your computer home and checking e-mail after the kids go to sleep, or working in ‘virtual’ organizations from a home office,” Carlson explained. “However, that might be good for some people but not for others who would work all the time and have difficulty separating themselves from their work. But if they can achieve separation and if they live in an area with a lot of traffic or they have a huge commute, techflexing like that can save a great deal of time.”

• Simplifying is the acknowledgment that more is not necessarily better, that modest pursuits can result in reduction of life’s complexities. Or simplifying could be applied in small doses, by, for example, turning off cell phones and pagers for a designated block of time. Carlson says improvement can be achieved using fewer than all five strategies. “Even if you can make some adjustment using only one or two strategies, that would be beneficial,” she said, adding, “I’m pretty decent at outsourcing and at techflexing.”

The research was conducted through personal interviews throughout the United States, many of them by telephone. The authors interviewed friends, friends of friends, acquaintances of business associates and contacts that Sandholtz and Buckner met while conducting seminars. “Finding willing participants who met our criteria was one of the more difficult parts of our research,” confided Carlson, who has been on the faculty of Baylor since 1998. Beyond Juggling, which was published last summer, has spawned a Web site (http://www.beyondjuggling.com), which offers additional information as well as three “application tools,” through which people can evaluate the demands upon their own lives and identify opportunities for moving beyond juggling

HANKAMER SCHOOL OF BUSINESS