While work-life balance improved for many people during the pandemic as they were able to suddenly able work from home, remote and hybrid work arrangements brought their own complications — so today we thought we'd round up a few books that focus on work-life balance.

One of the three specifically explores the post-pandemic workplace (it still feels premature to say “post,” right?), another focuses on women and burnout, and the third is aimed at working moms. (Note: You will not find a mention of Lean In in this post — oops, except for that one.)

Readers, have you read any books on work-life balance? What are your favorites? How do you feel about the term “work-life balance” in general?

We've talked a lot about work-life balance here at Corporette, including how to ask your interviewer about work-life balance, how to find a family-friendly job, how to plan your career for babies, how to find balance as a working mom, advice on work-life balance from working moms to their pre-mom selves, and work-life boundaries — rituals and other ways to separate your work and personal life. On related notes, we've also talked about how to work after your kids go to bed, when to quit your career, and how to stay connected as a stay at home parent. You also may want to check out our regular series at CorporetteMoms where working moms share a week in their life!

Psst: We're planning to do regular mini-roundups like this for books on certain topics — if you have any to recommend, shout them out in the comments!

{related: some of the best books on happiness}

3 Books About Work-Life Balance for Professional Women

Out of Office: Unlocking the Power and Potential of Hybrid Work

by Charlie Warzel and Anne Helen Petersen, 2023 (Amazon/Bookshop)

You may be familiar with Anne Helen Petersen's work, but if not, she's a writer and journalist who publishes the Substack newsletter Culture Study (recommend!) and wrote the book Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation, which was inspired by the popularity of her BuzzFeed News piece about millennial burnout. Petersen's partner, journalist Charlie Warzel, writes the column Galaxy Brain for The Atlantic. This book has a personal angle for the couple, as they left New York City several years ago to work remotely from Montana.

This book, which came out about three years after the start of the pandemic, explores the elements of — and future of — hybrid work. Although we've all seen the countless articles and think pieces about remote and hybrid work over the last few years, this is the first book I've come across that specifically addresses the world of post-pandemic work.

Out of Office focuses on trust, fairness, flexibility, inclusive workplaces, equity, and work-life balance.

Praise for Out of Office:

• “Never sacrificing meaningful analysis for easy answers, this is a remarkable examination of the rapidly-changing workplace,” Publishers Weekly
• “[Out of Office]”reads like a necessary, of-the moment dispatch from our overworked brains, still processing the past couple of years, struggling to make sense of an office away from the office, wondering if you’re the only one who feels nuts,” Chicago Tribune
• Notable mentions from Fortune, Inc.com, LitHub, TechCrunch, TechRepublic, and other publications

{related: how to ask your job interviewer about work-life balance}

Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle

by Emily Nagoski, PhD, and Amelia Nagoski, DMA, 2019 (Amazon/Bookshop)

If you'd rather read about work-life balance in a more general context — and in a book centered on women's lives — this title may be for you. Emily Nagoski is primarily known for her popular book about women and sex, Come As You Are — and as she told Brené Brown on Brown's podcast, she came up with the idea for Burnout after hearing readers praise the chapter in Come As You Are about stress and emotions. She brought her twin, Amelia Nagoski (a conductor and professor) on board to write Burnout.

As the Burnout website shares, “Burnout is for women (or anyone) who has felt overwhelmed and exhausted by everything they have to do, yet still worried they weren't doing ‘enough.'” Sound familiar to any readers out there? We're thinking the answer is yes. This book explains how to manage stress, frustration, negative body image, negative self-talk, and more, while emphasizing the importance of rest and connecting with others.

Burnout has an companion book called The Burnout Workbook: Advice and Exercises to Help You Unlock the Stress Cycle (Amazon/Bookshop) that features questions for reflection, skill exercises, stories, quotes, and more.

Praise for Burnout:

• Included in Book Riot's “The Best Books of 2019“: “This book is phenomenal in ways I never anticipated a book on this subject could be and I wholly recommend it.”
• “I loved it. I read it early to prep for the podcast interview, and I highlighted SO MUCH text. I’m thinking I should order it in bulk to give to every person I know who is struggling with stress,” Smart Bitches, Trashy Books
• “[The authors] have a gift for making the self-help genre not make you want to poke your eyes out,” Cup of Jo

{related: how have you kept work-life boundaries when you work from home?}

Work, Parent, Thrive: 12 Science-Backed Strategies to Ditch Guilt, Manage Overwhelm, and Grow Connection

by Yael Schonbrun, PhD, 2022 (Amazon/Bookshop)

“Ditch guilt, manage overwhelm, and grow connection” sounds like a tall order, but Schonbrun is a clinical psychologist who specializes in relationships, an assistant professor at Brown, and a mom of three, so the advice comes from a promising source — plus, it's is backed up by research. (And, just as with Burnout, above, you don't have to worry about coming across any rah-rah “Yes, you CAN have it all!” messages.)

{related: the best books for working mothers}

Schonbrun gives parents 12 strategies based on the mindful psychotherapy technique called acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT). They encompass practicing mindfulness at home and at work, reframing how you look at both aspects of your life, exploring your personal values, and more. The objective is to experience more joy and less guilt — and to realize how “Work can make parenthood better, and parenthood can make work better.”

Praise for Work, Parent, Thrive:

• 2023 National Parenting Product Award Winner
• 2023 Next Generation Indie Book Awards Finalist
• “This will be a balm for overwhelmed working parents” (Publishers Weekly)

{related: advice on work-life balance from working moms to their pre-mom selves (CorporetteMoms)}

Readers, do tell: What books or other resources have you found that provide strategies about work-life balance? Are you familiar with any of the titles above?

Other Books for Corporate Women

The Best Books for Businesswomen

Some must-read business books for women — update coming soon!

{related: the best TED talks for working women}

The Best Books for Working Mothers

Some of the best books for working mothers include:

The Best Personal Finance Books for Beginners

These are some of our latest favorite financial books for beginners:

The Best Books on Productivity

Some of our latest favorite books on productivity, below:

{related: the best resources for new managers}

The Best Books on Changing Your Career

Psst: These are some of our favorite books if you're considering changing your career

More Recommended Reading

• Great Books with Networking Tips for Women
• How to Be Happy: The Best Books on Happiness
• The Best Resources for Becoming a Better Manager
• Great Books to Help You Achieve Your New Year's Resolutions

The post 3 Great Books About Work-Life Balance for Professional Women appeared first on Corporette.com.

What are reasonable boundaries when you're highly paid? How do you make work/life boundaries that you and others in your life respect?

Readers had a few great threadjacks on just this topic — one on reasonable boundaries when you're in Big Law, and another one on reasonable boundaries when you're charging $$$$/hr.

What Reasonable Boundaries Look Like if You're Highly Paid

Although obviously there could be multiple fields where you're charging 4+ figures an hour, this is most notable in the legal world, where these days even associates could be billed at $1,000 or more per hour. So, a number of readers who are in-house counsels responded in that thread. One noted:

I think as the client you can expect a near immediate response except in the middle of the night, but I wouldn’t necessarily expect the partner himself to be doing the substantive work if he’s on vacation or it’s a major holiday.

Another in-house counsel noted:

If I’m working into the evenings on a deal and am paying expensive outside counsel, I expect them to be there with me (metaphorically).

I do not expect that if I send a random late-night email when I’m digging out of my inbox, that I get an immediate reply!

And a third in-house counsel noted:

My expectation as in-house counsel for outside counsel is that you will respond to me within one business day acknowledging that you got my request and letting me know by when you can complete the work. So, reasonable boundaries would be whatever allows that responsiveness.

{related: when is a lower salary worth it?}

Reasonable Boundaries in Big Law In General

The first threadjack was prompted by an Ask a Manager column about work-life balance (the AAM letter writer resented Gen Z colleagues who were trying to make better boundaries), and readers were guessing the letter writer worked in Big Law.

In general, people thought that regular work/life boundaries don't really apply to Big Law; one commenter noted: “Yeah, you can draw and have to draw boundaries regardless of where you work, but in Big Law those boundaries are ‘I won’t answer 3 am emails immediately' not ‘I only work 40 hours/week.'”

We've talked about this a lot about work-life balance over the years — in our discussion on answering work emails at home, one reader shared a story of a senior associate getting chewed out for not answering a work email at 9 p.m. His reason? His daughter was watching a movie on his phone and didn't hand it over when the email came in. This was actually a cause for a big debate among readers, at least back in 2016. (For my $.02, I find that a little surprising — phones exist if there's something urgent, yes?)

(Actually, that entire discussion is really fascinating — in 2016 they recognized very little wiggle room to not answer emails immediately “except at insane hours of the night.” Those of you in BigLaw, do you agree in 2023?)

Back when I was fresh from BigLaw, my own advice on keeping work/life boundaries mostly boiled down to stuff I could do myself, like changing into jeans when I got home to feel like I could be a more relaxed person than I was at the office… in other words, protecting my mental health against the “always on” mentality of BigLaw. I remember thinking I was being so rebellious to not get notifications from my work email from 12 a.m. to 6 a.m., but that was mostly because the firm's spam filter regularly sent out notifications at 4 a.m., which would wake me up in my little studio apartment.

Readers, what are your thoughts? What are reasonable boundaries if you're highly paid in this day and age — whether your time is being charged at $1,000 an hour, or you're working in an intense industry?

(This post is admittedly focused on BigLaw, but readers noted that healthcare and intelligence/security are another two industries with major ramifications if one tries to enforce boundaries…)

Stock photo via 123rf.com / BeritKessler.

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I've seen a lot of discussion lately in the comments about quiet quitting, disengaging from your career, and more — so I thought we'd discuss. What are your best tips on ways to stay engaged in your career? Why do you think it's important to stay engaged — or the flip side? Can you be engaged in your career and still have a work-life balance more heavily weighted towards life?

A question I'd be interested to hear some of the readers ponder: What are the best ways to stay engaged in your career when you're in a lockstep system like BigLaw, where everyone advances at the same rate and is paid the same?

{related: disengaging instead of quitting vs leaning out}

Why to Stay Engaged In Your Career

There are 168 hours in the week. If you have a strict 40-hour workweek and sleep for 7 hours a night, you're at work a full third of your time. I can tell you from experience: If you're not engaged, work is going to be a slog. Furthermore, it often feels like the main consequence of being disengaged is that you're unproductive, requiring more time at work.

In 2022 terms, this doesn't mean that quiet quitting or leaning out is bad — it feels like there is a huge movement that is reassessing what people want from their jobs, as well as what kind of work-life balance they prefer.

{related: how to set work-life boundaries}

Hopefully the below tips will be an on-ramp back to being engaged in your career and your job, regardless of whether you've been willfully disengaged for a while or if you find yourself disengaging by accident.

3 Ways to Stay Engaged In Your Career

Reengage with Your Career by Learning Something New

If you've been doing the same things at your job for a while now, mix things up by learning a new skill, an alternative way of doing things, or more niche facts. Some employers might keep lists of different skills (I know my old law firm did); you may also be able to look at your coworkers and classmates and see what things they've done that you just don't know about. Another option here: Find a conference or course you can take that is related to your current job.

• How to Keep Learning at Work
• The Best Online Women's Management Training
• Strategic Volunteering — Do You Do It?

Look for Complementary Career Paths

This kind of comes back to learning something new, as well as networking — there are probably a number of things you can do with your degree, job experience, skills, and interests — and it might be interesting to explore those. For example, a BigLaw lawyer might want to learn about smaller firms, in-house work, teaching, or transitioning to another job entirely for one of their legal clients. Don't forget about connecting with old classmates — it might be interesting to see where some have landed.

Some of our previous posts on this topic that might be of interest:

• Career Pivots: How to Change Your Career in a Major Way
• How to Build Your Network — And Maintain It
• Networking in Your Niche — But Outside Your Company
• Tips for Finding and Joining Professional Organizations

Tip #3 for Staying Engaged: Mentoring

If you're at the point where you want to disengage a bit, you've also probably reached the stage where you have some wisdom and can pass it along to someone else. It's as easy as asking a more junior coworker out to lunch — and note that it may even help you if you realize they have newer skills that you do not (tip #1) or if they're aware of different career paths you haven't considered.

• Mentoring Advice: How to Be a Great Mentor and Mentee

Readers, what do you think are the best ways to stay engaged in your career? Do the answers change if you're in a lockstep system like BigLaw? What do you think are the benefits to staying engaged?

{related: when to quit your career — and how to know if your job is right for you}

Stock photo via Stencil.

The post 3 Ways to Stay Engaged In Your Career appeared first on Corporette.com.

There have been a few interesting threadjacks recently about readers reassessing where they live, who they work for, and even their entire career path — so I thought it might be an interesting discussion. Are you reassessing your career and lifestyle? Is it in response to the pandemic (or in response to others' responses, such as your office going mostly remote), to politics (e.g., deciding to move after Dobbs), climate change, or due to other reasons? I'm curious — do you feel like the past few years of decreased social outings gave you more time for introspection, and that you have more insight now into what you want or need?

Here are the questions:

• Are you changing your lifestyle or career in a major way?
• How are you going about the changes, i.e., what steps are you taking to research or enact the changes?
• What do you see the pros and cons of the change?
• What do you still NOT know about the change?

We haven't spoken about how to change your career in a major way in a few years… In the past, I've identified three things that helped me change my career from lawyer to online content creator: 1) research, 2) assess the quality of life differences, 3) identify what you don't know, 4) network, and 5) make the leap.

I think these steps still help you with major career changes as well as major lifestyle changes, although I think the big thing that is #3, which is that you don't know if or how the next few years of viruses, climate change, politics and other factors will play out. (For my $.02, it feels like life is going to continue to feel pretty volatile on a lot of these fronts for the foreseeable future.)

Some of our previous posts that might help if you're considering a big change:

How to Research a New Career

• 5 Books To Read if You're Considering Changing Your Career
• The Pros and Cons of Changing Careers (From People Who've Done It)
• Tips from Readers on Changing Careers
• How to Ask Your Interviewer about Work-Life Balance
• All About Strategic Volunteering
• How to Conduct a Long-Distance Job Search (and Jobhunting in a Different City)
• How to Secretly Use Linked In to Change Careers
• How to Change Jobs, But Not Companies
• When is a Lower Salary Worth It?
• How Your Career Affects Your Happiness

What to Consider Before Moving and Other Big Lifestyle Changes

• What to Consider Before Moving to a Lower Cost of Living Area
• What to Consider If You're Thinking About Moving to the Suburbs
• Do the Benefits of Living Closer to Work Outweigh the Cons?
• Where You Live is One of the Biggest Money Decisions You Make
• How to Take a Job Far From Friends and Family

How to Be More Social

• How to Make New Friends and Network
• How to Form a Group of Girlfriends as an Adult
• How to Make Time for Friends If You Work A Lot

How to Cut Expenses If You're Taking a Paycut

• Tips from a Lawyer-Turned-Student

Psst: These are some of our favorite books if you're considering changing your career

Stock photo via Stencil.

The post What Career and Lifestyle Changes Are You Making in 2022? appeared first on Corporette.com.

Any company can claim to have a healthy work culture, but knowing how to ask your job interviewer about work-life balance can help you cut through any platitudes the employer has on their website or shares during the recruitment process.

Until the U.S. follows the lead of countries like France, which requires employees to eat lunch away from their desks, or Portugal, where bosses aren't permitted to contact employees outside working hours (hey, let's be optimistic for a moment), finding out what you can about work-life balance is essential.

Readers, what's your advice for how to ask your job interviewer about work-life balance?

{related: check out our entire Guide to Women's Interview Attire!}

How to Ask Your Job Interviewer About Work-Life Balance

Here are some ways to use your job interview to get important insight an employer's work-life balance, including reader advice from this great comment thread from earlier this year.

Ask employees at the company (other than your interviewer): One reader recommended talking about work-life balance with the people who would be your peers if you took the job.

{related: work-life boundaries: rituals and other ways to separate your work and personal life}

For example, ask about a typical daily schedule (for regular and busy weeks alike), flexibility for doctor's appointments, any tasks that would require night or weekend work, and so on. If it applies to you, ask about things like maternity leave (for example, how reachable and responsive are new parents expected to be?) and taking unexpected time off to care for sick kids or stay home for school snow days.

You can also reach out to former employees. Look for second-degree connections on LinkedIn and ask your first-degree connections to make introductions. Because people might be wary of putting not-entirely-positive comments in writing, you could ask if it's possible to talk confidentially on the phone. Inquire about the importance of face time to management, the flexibility for remote or hybrid work, accommodations for parents, and so on.

{related: what are family-friendly jobs? (CorporetteMoms)}

Ditch subtlety and ask your interviewer (or future boss, if that's a different person) directly: One reader with kids shared that she asks questions to find out whether she'll be able to see her kids regularly on workdays, be home for family dinners, pick up her kids from school if they get sick in the middle of the day, etc. She said, “It’s too important to me to not have the direct conversation.”

Another reader who recently interviewed multiple candidates for a job opening commented that every candidate asked her to describe the company culture and/or the company's work-life balance, while a third reader said that rather than beating around the bush, candidates have specifically asked about being contacted by email during vacations or leaving work for kid-related events.

{related: how to work after your kids go to bed}

Don't just take their word for it: One reader shared that she has driven by potential firms after 6:00 p.m. to see if the lights were on, i.e., if people were still working. (She recognized that the proportion of people working from home in 2022 complicates this a bit, but pointed out that having a ton of employees working past 6:00 in an age of remote and hybrid work could be an even stronger indicator of poor work-life balance.)

Here's a similar tactic: If you have an early-morning or late-evening interview, take a look at how many employees are at work.

{related: how to find balance as a working mom (CorporetteMoms)}

Another reader who said she doesn't expect employers to be very honest when asked about work-life balance wrote that, instead of asking questions like those above, she relies more on specific inquiries about project timelines and her observations on how would-be peers interact with one another.

Readers, do tell: How do you ask job interviewers (and other people at a potential employer) about work-life balance and company culture? Have you felt that you've received honest answers in the past? Were you told certain positive things about an employer that you later found out (after accepting an offer) weren't true? What are your best tips for how to ask your job interviewer about work-life balance?

Stock photo via Pexels / Karolina Grabowska.

{related: advice on work-life balance from working moms to their pre-mom selves (CorporetteMoms)}

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A few weeks ago I saw an interesting Twitter thread from Business Insider about how, while there's much being written right now about “the Great Resignation,” there's actually something more common happening around the globe with workers: disengagement.

They posited that instead of outright quitting, people were disengaging with their work — phoning it in, not taking on as many projects as they could, feigning being busy. (Acting like there's more to life than career! The nerve!) I thought it was a really interesting topic — particularly when set against what a lot of us probably think about now as “leaning out” (or even just general work-life balance!!) — so let's discuss.

Have you ever disengaged from work instead of quitting? Have you ever managed someone who disengaged from work instead of quitting? Where are the boundaries between disengaging, leaning out, and having healthy work-life balance — and is there a business etiquette associated with them? (And how does all of this compare to burnout?)

Psst — they're also calling this “quiet quitting“!

I recognize this from my own work history, to be honest, although I would have called it “treading water” instead of being disengaged. At a certain point in my legal career I decided other matters took priority, and instead of Striving! to! Make! Partner! or even looking for a better job for the long run, I just… treaded water at my BigLaw job. I did the work assigned to me without being overly concerned about my ultimate hours. I still worked late, still did good work (on good cases, for the most part; I was very lucky in my career!) and still got my full bonuses … but it was a far, far cry from the Go-Getter attitude I'd had all during law school and the first year or two of practice. (I would not advise this in the BigLaw of today… I could kind of get away with it way back when because business was booming.)

I remember thinking at the time that this was the natural way of things — a sign of adulthood, even — that instead of trying to “go hard” the way I'd gone in law school, I should recognize that my career has a longer timeline, and that my career shouldn't be the only thing in my life. (I actually used to have the mantra “My job is not my career is not my life.”) It was me trying to find some semblance of work-life balance, for the first time ever in my life. (I also have some shame in even telling you guys this, even though so many years have passed — like I was doing something wrong by not Striving Super Hard to be the best third year associate to ever third year associate!)

I'm really interested to hear what you guys think about this. For my own $.02, I'd define these slight but important differences:

• Treading water / being mildly disengaged / “prioritizing work-life balance”: Doing the work required of you but nothing more — “keep the job” instead of “advance the career” kind of thinking. I'd hopefully think most pandemic-related work disruption would fall into this category, e.g., as parents manage erratic school schedules / sick family members / disruption of regular care schedules.
• Being burned out: Being unable to engage with work at the level to which you'd like to because you actively need to prioritize self-care, sleep, Life Outside of Work-type things to reconnect with yourself — “Who am I and what am I doing here?” kind of thinking, with job/career being totally secondary.
• Leaning out; Similar to treading water but perhaps with a set end date (baby's second birthday, for example, or birth of a second child); hopefully done intentionally enough that there's a conversation with management about flexible work, reduced hours, etc. “Pause/decrease the job in a way that leaves you an on-ramp back to full job/advancing career” kind of thinking.
• Disengaging instead of quitting: Intentionally doing as little work as possible, feigning being busy, and taking every shortcut necessary. Think George Costanza. I would call this kind of thinking “indifference to end of career/job.”

Readers, what are your thoughts? (And are there other categories that you would add in this list — go-getters who are striving to prove themselves at the job? Movers who are intentionally trying to level up their career by seeking a new job or more responsibilities/titles at their current job?) Do you think workers should signal to their managers as they move in and out of these different attitudes toward work, or that business etiquette dictates that conversations be had?

If you've managed people in any of these categories, were there red flags for you as a manager — and how did you handle that? For readers who recognize themselves as being disengaged or treading water, how did you reengage or “start swimming” again?

Stock photo via Shutterstock / Dean Robot; “whatever” in font Perfect Redemption.

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