If you’re feeling overwhelmed, finding a quick fix is unfortunately probably not in the cards. That’s because the secret to real work-life balance isn’t a to-do list, it’s a timeline. The piece of work-life balance most people get wrong is the temporal component. It’s the time required to reset expectations and get past the short term deadlines everyone has agreed to. That fact that we have to look at work-life balance for the future and not for today is the secret that I think most people miss.
Let me be clear and say this secret won’t make all our work-life balance problems go away, but for me the time component has been absolutely monumental in reducing life stress and helping me enjoy my days. My life got much better when I came to understand that work-life balance has a 10-week lag time.
If you’re feeling overwhelmed right now, there’s probably not much you can do today to relieve this pressure. If you’re drowning, you are doubtlessly looking around at commitments that have already been made and holidays that have a lot of expectations baked into them. It might even feel like there’s no way out but to just swim harder.
In the short term, swimming harder might be what needs to happen. But that’s not how you have to live. To get closer to the life we want to have, we need about 10 weeks to unwind the obligations we’ve already agreed to, get past the deadlines we’ve already set, and reset expectations others have placed on us. In short, we need to start making adjustments today for where we want to be later on.
Imagine that your life is a very long car. The hood sticks out about the length of a blue whale (for those who like to measure things in animals) and the steering wheel is at the very back. Perhaps it looks something like this:
(Note the terror in the driver’s eyes. This is how life often feels when we’re driving it – especially when we have kids or employees)
I think most people think of their life like a sports car. They imagine reacting with lightning fast reflexes and making adjustments in the moment. That would work great… if lives were built like sports cars. But they are not. Most of our lives have 10-week-long hoods that are made up of all the expectations (both spoken and unspoken) and commitments that have been placed on us. Our hoods stick way out in front and make last second lane changes really difficult. If we want to be good life-car drivers, we have to look far down the road and start turning the wheel WAY before we actually arrive at the obstacle we want to avoid. This is the secret to work-life balance.
I know this doesn’t seem super helpful if you’re already drowning. A lot of us feel like our life-cars are bogged down in the mud with wheels spinning, and we want to get unstuck right now. I definitely get that, and I’m sorry, but getting some work-life balance in your life isn’t like drag racing. It has to happen at cruising speed.
The good news is that now is your opportunity to decide what you want to change in 2026 and to set those expectations for others. Before the holidays set in, we can look at our lives and ask ourselves “If I weren’t already doing this, would I choose to start it today?” If the answer is “no,” then maybe it’s time to let people know you’ll be stepping away in January.
“I just wanted to let you all know that I’m not going to be able to continue leading _________ in 2026. It has been a wonderful experience, but I have some other commitments that are going to be taking up my time.” It’s as simple as that.
At work, you can start using phrases like “I want to walk you through this process so you can take the lead on it beginning in January. This is a great opportunity for you to own it, and I’ll need to step back at the start of the year due to new commitments.”
Now is the time for 2026! If you worked all of 2025 and didn’t take a vacation, let’s put that on the 2026 calendar right now. Even if you don’t know where you’ll go – schedule it. Maybe take some Fridays off to give yourself some long weekends. You can think of vacation day scheduling like paying yourself first, but with free time instead of cash.
I don’t care if you take the time off and just stay home to get things done. This is the essence of work-life balance. But if you wait until you desperately need a day off, you’ll almost certainly be too swamped to take it. Book it now.
For me, the 10 week timeline has been important but it’s quite possible that you can shorten that if you’re decisive. You might still have time to say “I don’t know that we can host Christmas at our house this year. Is there anyone else who might take it this season?” It may not be too late to let people know you would prefer that someone else plan the clinic holiday party, or to tell your family that you are hoping to travel for only half of your holiday break instead of the whole thing.
Regardless of what adjustments you want to make to how you are spending your time, I hope that you will make them. I hope that you will get serious right now, put some things on your calendar, and take some other things off. I hope you’ll let people know that you are going to need to step back starting 10 weeks from now, and that you will book that vacation you’ve always been meaning to take. Most of all, I hope you’ll think about what you want your days to look like and to make some choices about how you’ll get there. You owe it to yourself to be able to take your foot off the gas and to cruise for a bit in your long-hooded car.
