Rachel Shafran
WCL Secretary
The upsurge in mobile devices – Blackberries, iPhones, iPads – has transformed the typical workday. The line between work and life has blurred. According to Sheryl Sandberg, Chief Operating Officer of Facebook, “There’s no such thing as work-life balance. There’s work, and there’s life, and there’s no balance”.
Sheryl Sandberg, mother of two, and outspoken advocate of women leaders, has recently been sharing her challenges of being a mother and trying to juggle family responsibilities with a demanding job at Facebook.
For years she’s left work at 5:30 pm so she could be home for dinner with her children, but has only recently started saying so publicly. Her hope, she said, is that discussing it openly will encourage others to feel comfortable doing the same.[1]
“I walk out of this office every day at 5:30 so I’m home for dinner with my kids at 6:00, and interestingly, I’ve been doing that since I had kids”, Sandberg says. “I did that when I was at Google, I did that here, and I would say it’s not until the last year, two years that I’m brave enough to talk about it publicly. Now I certainly wouldn’t lie, but I wasn’t running around giving speeches on it.”[2]
What time do you leave the office? Do you feel guilty as a woman leaving early?
[1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/06/sheryl-sandberg_n_1409061.html
[2] http://healthland.time.com/2012/04/12/facebooks-sheryl-sandberg-leaves-work-at-530-should-you/
{ 1 comment }
Thank you for this post! It is so important for us to realize that our productivity is not an infinite resource, and to advocate that fact. It’s not even just a matter of health and work-life balance, but also of productivity itself, which suffers if we don’t know how to take guilt-free breaks.
Comments on this entry are closed.