Building Balance - CASEY E. BERGER, PH.D.

Building Balance

Welcome to Building Balance! I’m an early-career physics professor and advocate for work-life balance and mental health. I learned the hard way in graduate school that if I didn’t create my own boundaries and find balance in my life, the world would take advantage of that. Now, I pass those lessons on to other knowledge workers who feel besieged by our era of constant connectivity and proscriptive passion.

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I also offer workshops on work-life balance for knowledge workers.

The book that gave me permission to rest... and play!

10/30/2022

I grew up in the Midwest, and I remember clearly being told when I was applying to colleges (by more than one person) that admissions committees like us cornfed midwestern kids, not because of our culturally-presumed wholesomeness, but specifically because of our work ethic. This was a myth I embraced wholeheartedly, because I did in fact have a very strong work ethic. I truly believed there was no such thing as a problem that couldn't be solved without as much hard work as was required.

Looking back, that idea was keeping me trapped in some unhealthy attitudes about myself. Ideas that I'm still untangling decades later.

But it was easy to stay trapped in those bad ideas, because I've never been very naturally inclined to idleness. Even my daydreams inevitably turn into projects. So how do you rest when everything about your personality and your cultural conditioning is telling you never to slow down, let alone stop?

This book has some much-needed answers for those of you who--like me--struggle to answer that question.

Review: Zen to Done

9/29/2022

Welcome to the first in a series of blog posts that highlight some of the books and other resources that I've found helpful in learning to manage my time and energy. This one was recommended to me by my sister-in-law, and I've decided to highlight it first because I think it's an amazing place to start if you're feeling overwhelmed.

Zen to Done is written by Leo Babauta, who is well-known in the world of minimalism, but you don't have to be a hardline minimalist to appreciate this book. As described on Babauta's website, Zen To Done, or ZTD, is a response to the Getting Things Done productivity method, with a more streamlined approach.

Less is more: lessons from my first year as faculty

8/24/2022

Well, it's certainly been a long time.

Last fall, I had high hopes that I would be able to continue posting on this blog regularly. Yes, I knew the first year as faculty was notoriously overwhelming. I knew I'd be in for what my colleague called in a very understated way "a very busy time."

But I also knew I was an organized, productive person. A person who was good at accomplishing goals. After all, I ran a blog about all those strategies and tools for making good use of time and managing expectations and setting smart goals. Plus, these posts were hardly a huge time commitment. Certainly much less time and effort goes into writing a short post than into planning even one day of the classes I was teaching. Wasn't all that true?

It turns out, it was. And that's exactly why this blog vanished for the better part of a year.

Why am I even doing this?

10/1/2021

It can be easy to get sucked into the details of our daily lives and lose sight of what motivated us to seek this degree, this job, this hobby, this insert-time-consuming-activity in the first place. There is always so much to do and not enough time to do it, and the stress and overwhelm of the details can affect our motivation and cause us to question whether this (whatever it is) is worth it.

I've extolled the benefits before of the monthly review to help keep the deadlines and minutia from controlling our actions, but sometimes we require a deeper investigation. Sometimes the question is not are my routines and systems working? but am I doing this for the right reasons? or even am I in the right career?

Wait, what was I doing? Combating time fragmentation and attention residue.

9/2/2021

Over the last few weeks, I have been packing up everything I own to move to a new town. The process of moving is always stressful (though it can be exciting as well!), and a bit part of the stress is the way all the little tasks of moving show up as constant distractions. There are boxes everywhere reminding you that you meant to pack that book you finished last night, the morning mail arrival makes you realize you need to start forwarding the mail, and then there's the actual process of moving, which never comes at a convenient time.

For the last few weeks, I've had my time divided up into smaller and smaller slices every day, and even though I'm still working roughly the same hours, it feels like I haven't made anywhere near as much progress is usual. The first few times this happened to me (I have moved many times in the last few years), I was frustrated. I was still working as much as I had planned, squeezing in 15 minutes here and 20 there on projects. So if I was putting in the same time, why was I not getting the same results?

Journaling for intentionality

8/2/2021

Every so often, I realize I've left behind a habit that was really helping me. Often, this is caused by some sort of external change. Something that causes a massive temporary upheaval, forcing me to rearrange my life. I may think I will return to all my habits once the dust has settled, but often things get dropped, and sometimes I'm lucky enough to -- eventually -- notice.

This particular habit was listening to a podcast regularly. The podcast is called The Mindful Kind, and it's a lovely, quick listen. Every episode is only around 10 minutes long, and the host, Rachael Kable, discusses mindfulness in the context of daily life. For me, it served as a regular reminder to pause and breathe, to find little ways to engage more fully in my own life. I'm in the middle of a few big job and life transitions right now, which are exciting and scary at the same time. I started listening to this podcast again every morning, just to take a few minutes to keep my brain in this mindset of living in a more intentional way, so I don't get caught up in the chaos of all this change. As part of this intentionality, I'm journaling more often.

This is more than just 8 weird tricks to boost your productivity. This is about connecting with yourself and thoughtfully building the life you want. In order to do that, you have to be prepared to ask yourself questions and listen for the answers.

Prioritization with urgent-important matrices

7/1/2021

I don't know about you, but it seems that for every item I check off my to-do list, there are five more that pop up from various locations. Maybe it's a request from a colleague, an idea I got from reading an article that I'd like to implement in my work, a suggestion from a supervisor or mentor, or a commitment to family or friends that arose from a conversation. Whatever the origin of these tasks, they have a tendency to snowball if we aren't careful about paring them down (or learning to say "no", which is a thing I am very bad at and I promise will someday be a blog post of its very own).

When things pile up, it can quickly feel impossible to accomplish any of them, let alone all of them. If only there were a neat tool to help distinguish between which activities are high priority and which we shouldn't even bother with.

It turns out, there is!

Goal Reviews

7/1/2021

You might notice this post is very late this month. I try to get my posts out within a few days of the first of the month. I think consistency is important, and it helps me stay on track. This month, however, I fell into a trap that I have definitely mentioned before and cautioned against: I set some way too ambitious deadlines for myself, and the last three or four weeks I’ve been scrambling to catch up.

It’s total coincidence that this month I was planning to write about goal reviewing, but I am so glad that it worked out that way. Let my late post be an example that this process is not simple or linear, and that you will have to re-evaluate constantly.

Goal setting: be SMART about it

7/1/2021

There's more to setting goals than putting check boxes next to your aspirations.

When I was about halfway through my doctoral program, I realized that I was really overwhelmed. I had been stressed for a long time, and I was certainly aware of how the pressures of grad school were feeding into my overall anxiety, but I had been working hard to set goals for myself and try to meet them. I just wasn’t succeeding. What was making me so stuck?

Time sprinting

7/1/2021

Batching your time for better focus and reducing procrastination.

One of the biggest barriers to our work-life balance is the amount of time we spend neither working nor playing.

You know the time I mean. It’s when you’re sitting at your desk, dreading some task that feels boring or intimidating or even impossible. You don’t want to start the task, either because you fear you can’t accomplish it in the end or because you just don’t want to do it. So you haven’t started. But instead of using the time not spent on that task to do some other important task or to rest and recover, you spend it worrying, your attention divided between whatever it is you tell yourself you’re focusing on and your dread.