You work 60 to 80 hour weeks just to keep the business going. With no break in sight, you wonder how long you can keep up this pace.
You would love to participate in your family's lives more or even have some time to call your own. But since life comes without instructions, let alone a blueprint, how can you possibly figure out how to do it?
We don't even realize how much time we actually put into work, according to D. Quinn Mills, M.A., Ph.D., professor of business administration at Harvard Business School and author of Having It All and Making It Work, Six Steps for Putting Both Your Career and Your Family First. "Work for many people claims a disproportionate amount of their time and attention," he says.
That's a lesson that Paul Winans, president of Winans Construction in Oakland, Calif., learned the hard way. "In the summer of 1978, my wife Nina and I had an opportunity to visit my parents in New York," Winans says. "I was really busy and couldn't take the time away from work, so I sent [my wife] Nina. Two months later my mother died."
"My focus on work was greater than anywhere else. I was doing all the things I thought a new business needed, including handling the accounting and preparing the proposals. I felt trapped and resentful," says Winans.
He explains that his focus rested heavily on his clients but "I didn't pay any attention to my well-being."
For Winans, his mother's unexpected death at age 58 became his catalyst for change, both as a business owner and family member. He realized his style of running his business was no longer sustainable. "I had to reorganize my priorities and become the most important person in my life," Winans says.
Nina Winans, a partner in the business, jumped in to help set needed boundaries that, among others, included no night meetings with clients. "If the client can't work with those boundaries, they probably won't be fun to work with anyway," she says.
When it came to the family, Paul admits, "I was going to stay busy unless I actually scheduled other things that were initially regarded as not as important."
As a result, he started putting camping trips with the kids and weekends spent in family activities on the calendar, just as if they were meetings with clients. And he treated them with the same sense of irrevocability and commitment.
