Down on Down Time or Down for Down Time

 

Being in professional services means the customer truly comes first. They don't fit into our needs and schedules; it's the other way around. We aim to be available and pride ourselves on high-touch service. We work hard on the work, but we also work hard to be accessible, responsive, and fast-acting.

Being a parent is an even more encompassing responsibility. I spend almost as many hours with my kids as I do at work, and I work a lot of hours. More so than the tangible tasks is the never-ending set of worries I have to be on my toes to potentially tend to at a literal moment's notice. 

There's a reason working parents struggle to find a balance. Practically, it's a lot to toggle between one set of responsibilities in the office and another at home. Emotionally, it's a lot to maintain a high level of alertness indefinitely, and to masterfully arrange a reasonable game plan to juggle it all only to have some unforeseen emergency crash into those plans and leave your ears ringing from the metaphoric alarm bells you now have to immediately respond to.

There is an increasing awareness that, even in professional services, people are allowed to have down time. Clients expect you to be available to them, but most are reasonable about that, especially as we are coming out of a COVID era in which so many of us had to juggle extraordinary home responsibilities while tending to work tasks.

Similarly, there is an increasing awareness that being a good parent does not mean that you always have to swoop in when your kids need something. Indeed, it is developmentally appropriate and emotionally healthy for kids to learn how to be bored, schedule their own social activities, and work through a life challenge without the safety net of calling on a parent to bail them out.

I must confess, and I'm sure others feel this guilt just as much if not even more, that it can be hard to carve out time for myself where I am utterly unavailable for work or family. Golf is that for me, and I'm grateful for the pastime as well as the space. But it has taken some getting used to guarding that space. Practically it means telling clients or employees or kids that a particular time in the week I am not available to them. It means not looking at my phone while I'm on the course or at the range. And it means busting my butt at all other hours, and particularly the hours right before or after, in order to keep that space free.

How easy or hard is it for you to preserve your down time? What are some psychological frameworks or practical tricks for giving yourself permission to do so? Philosophically I know I'm allowed to have my space, and over time I'm getting better at actually guarding it, but it is still a struggle, so I'm open to hearing how others have conquered this.