Tips for juggling multiple roles in your family, work, and school

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By now, you may have settled into some sort of a routine juggling multiple roles, with kids back to school and classes underway. Or you may just be feeling ever more out of control. Juggling the responsibilities of work, school—including research, teaching, and administration— and family. Not to mention health maintenance, spirituality, and much-needed social time. You can count me in the second category, even though my children are now grown and flown.

I still have multiple roles: in my family life, I am a wife and mother (from a distance), sister, child, and in-law. In my work life, I am the administrator of my coaching practice, consultant, writer, researcher, speaker, and community volunteer. I also am committed to managing my health through diet and exercise and having an active social life with friends and family. Whew. Listed like that, I already feel tired. Not to mention worried about dropping the balls I am responsible for keeping up in the air.

Metaphorically, juggling has come to mean attempting to balance competing demands. Juggling implies that all spheres are created equal, and we all know that’s not true. Juggling roles feels more like watching the middle ball, where your attention is currently focused, inflate as you throw it up in the air, while the ones coming down deflate into a more manageable size.

Maybe there is a better way of thinking about this. Maybe the answer lies in focusing on the ball most likely to drop at any given time. That’s usually the one at the top of the arc, front and center.

A better way to juggle multiple roles

If you are looking at those balls as the multiple roles you play in your life, you must first give yourself permission to drop the ball from time to time. Even highly experienced jugglers do that.  Listen to their patter when they do, and you will hear them commenting on the dropped ball while picking it up and getting it back into play. The act may be messy for a while but balls do bounce. These performers have already let go of the notion that they will be able to juggle perfectly every time.

Prioritize your roles

The next thing you need to do is to prioritize your roles. As you consider the various roles you play, get clear about why each role is important to you. What is your goal for your work? For your family? For service activities? Do you feel that one is more important than another? Do you prioritize work over family at all times? Or do you feel that different roles are important at different times? Knowing that sometimes you will have a project that must be finished and the family will take a back seat, or you have a sick elderly parent that means work will have to take the back seat for a while.

Now looking at the balls, decide your focus. Do kids need to be taken to soccer practice on a Saturday morning? Would the time with them in the car be good for your relationship? Family can take precedence for many people on the weekend. It is Monday morning, you have a class to teach at 8:00 AM on Tuesday, and you haven’t even looked over your notes. Your role as a teacher may take precedence. Or have you let your writing go for three weeks or more, and you can’t even remember what argument you were trying to make? At this point, it may be time to prioritize the role of author to get moving again. In the world of academia, writing falls into Steven Covey fourth time management quadrant, “important but not urgent.” In the long run, however, it can become quite urgent. In both of these examples, work roles take precedence.

Note how the roles change over time, fluctuating in importance depending on the current situation.

Determine what tasks make the role successful

Think about what tasks you have to do in order to be successful in each role.

If you are a professor needing to write, what needs to be done to get going again? Maybe the first step is following a few rituals like getting coffee set up next to your space, and clearing your mind with a short meditation. The second step is actually focusing on the work to be done: it could be revisiting an outline, finishing some research, checking some references, looking at your writing journal to see where you stopped last time; or it could be actual writing, starting or finishing the literature review through finalizing the conclusions.

As a parent, it might be focusing on the children to the exclusion of other matters. Not checking social media while eating dinner with the family, reading a bedtime story without the distraction of an electronic device, or getting kids out the door for school.

As a partner, it might be making time to really focus on enjoyable time together, like paddle-boarding or dinner out, again without any distractions.

Involve significant others in planning

Communicating what role is currently taking priority can be crucial for planning and follow through. If your partner and your kids know you have a critical deadline Monday morning and it will impact your family time together, it’s less likely that someone is going to get their feelings hurt or feel excluded. Especially if they know you will return to the role that is important to them in the near future.

If the situation is reversed, and you are not going to be able to work on a project like setting up a committee to redesign curriculum, or finishing a report on student enrollment, communicate that to the people affected. Then provide a workable deadline and meet it, so the next time a conflict occurs, you will have created good faith in your ability to handle the changes in the timeframe for delivery.

No matter what, at times the roles will be in conflict and someone will be disappointed. That’s a dropped ball. Just pick it up and start juggling again.

Look for ways your roles overlap

You can also look at the ways your various roles overlap: Early career academics are often new parents, given the timing for finishing graduate school and entering the professoriate. It helps to create a support system. Some professors I know exchange child care, using somewhat flexible schedules to handle everyone’s needs. The reciprocity builds great adult friendships, too.

I’ve heard of teachers watching movies with their children in the evening as part of their class preparation, thus merging work and family roles. Some people socialize with co-workers at lunch, on breaks or at happy hour to get those needs fed before returning to work or the family fold. Some folks actually make time for friends by scheduling it. The amount of time is usually finite but can be infinitely refreshing when returning to roles in either family or work.

Get clear on time demands for any given role

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: you cannot manage time. You can only manage what you do in the time available. In general, as you think about the tasks you need to complete to manage a particular role successfully, you need to add 20% to your own estimated time for completion. We are all guilty of believing we can do anything in less time than it actually takes.

Unexpected interruptions, requiring us to switch roles when we did not anticipate it, are one major reason for this.

For instance, this small piece has taken me five days to write. Each time I thought I had a free hour to focus on this, something came along that was truly urgent. In the South Carolina Lowcountry, we happily avoided a direct hit by Hurricane Florence. The people of the Upstate did not. I had a lot of supplies gathered to literally help us weather the storm. A neighbor came by to tell me of a municipal truck coming into our neighborhood within the next two hours, and I dropped everything to bag and box supplies I no longer needed for the pick-up to pass along to those in need.

This is, of course, a rather extreme example, but other interruptions can be an unexpectedly sick child, a traffic delay getting to the office, a text from a partner letting you know his sister has arrived two days earlier than anticipated, or something as simple as answering the telephone knowing the conversation is likely to take longer than two minutes. Each interruption costs you concentration and therefore time.

Remind yourself of the benefit to you of multiple roles

Multiple roles can actually help you do a better job in any given area by giving perspective and creating new skills you might not otherwise attain. I know for a fact I would have been a horrible mother if forced to stay at home with children. I needed the intellectual challenge of work and adult companionship to enjoy the time with my children. My kids did not suffer from this. They had their own intellectual stimulation and social time with their peer groups. In fact, they were proud of me and my work and never lost an opportunity to brag about it when given a chance.

Relish the opportunity and variety even as you pick up the dropped balls and begin again.

If juggling multiple roles is too overwhelming, contact Hillary for a FREE 20-minute session.

Tags: be prepared, communication, get organized, goal setting, planning