Last week, SouthernBelle, the lab tech of the PI that shares our lab space had a really rough time. She is having one of the shittiest months of her life. There must be a singularity somewhere in our lab because not only did SouthernBelle have a clusterfuck in her personal life, but mine, as most of you know, has been nothing but challenging, and our undergrad CakeBakertoAnimals, also had it rough with some family issues. The good news. For all of us, experiments are running smoothly and we're starting to get some fabulous data.
Based on a sample size of N=3 (and my own autocorrelated data of lifetime experiences), I think the concept of "work-life balance" needs revising.
I've captured this new definition in Figure 1. Work-life balance means that there is an inverse relationship between how well things are going in your personal life and your work life. So yeah, my entire study population was demolished in a fire and my supervisor has told me that I have to finish in two years, but at least my boyfriend has asked me to marry him and I just won a trip to Spain.
I hate trade-offs.
Oh sure, there are the occasional outliers when both work and your personal life have you head first in a toilet. Or the time when things are all candy apples and cotton candy and you know it so you ride that wave. But for the most part I think this inverse relationship is really true.
And as a result, this is the one and only time I can honestly say I'd rather not have work-life balance.
2 comments:
Yeah, the balance thing is a myth.
But I gotta say, lately my personal life is not great and my work life is worse. I guess I'm in the "shizzle" part of the graph.
When I was a grad student, though, it was totally true, the inverse correlation was the only way to make any sense out of it. But sadly, you can't really force it, either. Dumping your wonderfully distracting hot boyfriend will NOT make your experiments work any faster. =(
LOL, I'm in one of the double-peaks right now. I'm milking it for all its worth. I think I'm even going to leave work early.
I'll probably crash my car on the way home...
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