#work-life-balance

#work-life-balance

That title's not a typo. The 5-to-9 is the time period before and after the 9-to-5 workday. Social media influencers have racked up millions of views showing off their outside-of-work schedules-#5to9routine has more than 35 million views on TikTok. During these videos, quick cuts of clips show off aspirational mornings and evenings packed with journaling, working out, meditating, cleaning, side hustling, and more. The trend's an offshoot of the " 5am club," which counts Mark Zuckerberg and Michelle Obama as early-rising members.

I was off work for a few weeks, but without paid leave I had to return sooner than doctors advised. I worked from home for a few months since I still couldn't drive. I loved the challenge of the work, the way no day was ever the same, and I had thrived on that pace. But I was still recovering. Winded by the smallest physical activity, I struggled with memory, and words sometimes came out scrambled or not at all.

The pressure to provide and increase my salary is starting to feel interminable

I was entirely on my own when I was 19. While I was enrolled in college, I worked full-time at night in the call center of a fintech company, Jack Henry & Associates. It was a gritty, hands-on role, but an exciting time to be with the company, which was growing quickly. I didn't have a typical college experience. I worked a lot so I could pay for my car and home. At work, I put my hand up any chance I could. I was never the smartest person, but I worked really hard and was always willing to figure out problems. Even if I'd never done something, I would figure it out. I couldn't afford to fail, personally or professionally.

After the pandemic, I realized life was too short to keep saying "one day." Sitting on the dock at my parents' cottage in Ontario, the sun melting into the lake, it hit us: "If not now, when?" Almost a year later, in September 2023, we packed up our two kids and moved to the South of France for a year.

even when women are the primary breadwinners, they perform two to four times more housework than men. Their research explores how households could benefit if lower-income men adjusted their schedules to take on more domestic tasks and allowed higher-income women to work longer hours outside the home. Their analysis revealed that the time women spend on housework decreases after divorce, while men's time increases.

You quit the 9-to-5 to have more control over your time. You wanted flexibility, autonomy, and the freedom to structure your days around your life instead of someone else's schedule. Yet here you are, apologizing to a client for not responding to a message immediately. Feeling guilty on a Tuesday afternoon when you've only worked for four hours that day. Checking Slack at 9:00 PM because that's been your routine for most of your working career.

Research going back almost 100 years finds that when you have a task to complete, you are highly motivated to finish it. It stays active in your memory, and you seek opportunities to get it done. That tendency is normally a good one. But on a break, it is a factor that will drive your mind back to the workplace-even when you're supposed to be relaxing. To give yourself the best chance to chill, see if you can close out key tasks before you leave. At a minimum, reach a good stopping place on tasks so that you don't feel like you have left them incomplete.

Before my husband and I had children, I earned more than him. I had a senior role at a well-known brand and then, 20 years ago, started a leadership development consultancy. When we had children, I decided to work fewer hours to take care of our boys, who are now 14 and 12. As I was self-employed and could therefore be more flexible with my work hours, I took charge of everything at home, including getting the boys ready for school,

Despite the ways in which its forced some uncomfortable adjustment, it's ultimately allowed for a more work-life balance, with the scale slightly tipping more towards life for many. In fact, the "microshifting" trend that's recently surfaced on social media, which references the idea of breaking up your work day into shorter blocks of time so that real-life responsibilities can be squeezed in, proves that with the right kind of strategy, there's always time to do it all.

A nest egg of $18 million per year is very large. At a safe 3.7% withdrawal rate, the Redditor could spend $666,000 per year. Since the OP said he's spending $300K plus his mortgage payments, he's most likely well below that amount (depending on just how much the mortgage balance is). Since his income needs would be more than met by his savings, there's really very little reason to continue doing work he doesn't enjoy.

About one in three Australians are time-poor with the majority working unpaid hours, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics. But women are bearing the brunt with more than 36 per cent always feeling rushed or pressed for time, compared with about 30 per cent of men. The most common reason for feeling rushed was trying to balance work and family. It comes as the bureau issues its key takeaways on how we spent our time in 2024. It categorised the way Australians spend their time in four ways: personal care for self, employment and education, unpaid work and free time. The survey found most people had done unpaid work but fewer people reported doing unpaid work on days they did paid work.

We've been trained for years, if not decades, to go at a certain pace, react fast, and constantly strive for success. But at what cost? Workplace culture can breed constant reactivity, where multiple demands dominate our days. The question is about balance: how do we sustain good energy and personal growth throughout our careers, remaining curious and creative without burning out? We're actual humans needing a more inclusive, balanced approach to live well. That's really been the key theme, regardless of industry or level

Cuban's origins are fairly humble. He was raised in a middle-class family in Pittsburgh and once had a job selling garbage bags door-to-door around his neighborhood (yes, you read that correctly). He bootstrapped his way up, starting with bartending and software sales before founding MicroSolutions, which he sold for $6 million in 1990, and later co-founding Broadcast.com, acquired by Yahoo for $5.7 billion in stock during the dot-com boom.

In a report conducted by the Guardian, the proposal of a four-day week for schools was met with an overwhelmingly positive response. Parents cited everything from their children's mental health to not worrying so much about absences as reasons for the four-day week to work. Teachers even loved the idea, noting that if the fifth day of the week were simply a teacher workday, it would free up their weekends from school and teaching tasks, allowing them to actually get a much-needed (and deserved) break.

Firstly, 2025 really took on the 'challenging times economically' baton from 2024 with gusto. I've written numerous times attempting to provide some guidance for people tackling uncertainty and a challenging economic landscape. From leaders struggling with team cuts to international students facing sponsorship challenges to professionals questioning their career paths; 2025 wasn't the return to abundance we all hoped for.

After the day of meetings, dinner, socializing, and after-dinner drinks, I found myself in the hotel room. On the surface, the day had been a nice departure from the stress of the prior weeks. But it was quiet, I was alone, exhausted, and felt numb. I stepped into the shower and, without warning, the floodgates of emotion burst forth, and I cried harder than I had cried in the weeks and months prior.

"I had to beat traffic to get out to the High Performance Centre and I had a long work call between 8am and 11am," Johnny Sexton recalls. "The lads were then coming out to training and I was sitting there in the car with my shirt on. Call over, I'd have to take it off, put my gear on, jump out, train with the lads, do the kicking session, back into the car and off to work again for the rest of the day."

Gift Giving. Your staff works hard. Don't rely solely on your firm to provide holiday gifts. Get your legal assistant and paralegal a gift to show you appreciate them. Beyond your staff, give gifts to anyone else who has made your job easier this year. Holiday Cards. If your firm still provides its lawyers with holiday cards, secure some and send them out. If not, purchase a box or two of holiday cards and send them to colleagues and friends. And please, no e-cards.

Today, that roadmap is beginning to shift. A growing number of young Chinese people are starting to explore smaller cities, where the pace is less frenetic and a work-life balance is more attainable. This shift stems from a change in priorities. Stagnant wages, high youth unemployment, chronic burnout and increasingly realistic life expectations are pushing an entire generation one marked by competitiveness and pressure to seek a balance between ambition and mental well-being.