Illustration by Sol Linero
It took four rounds of phone tag with two different assistants to find a time when I could talk with Jennifer Joyce, circuit attorney for the city of St. Louis. By the time we finally connected, during a sliver between her morning meetings, I was en route to vacation, furiously typing notes against the bleat of airplane boarding announcements.
Like so many women in St. Louis and across America, Joyce and I had plenty of well-meaning intent. But free time? Not so much.
On average, full-time U.S. employees work 47 hours a week, according to a recent Gallup report. By contrast, workers in such countries as Germany and Switzerland average 35 hours per week for roughly the same annual income. The U.S. is the only developed nation not to guarantee some amount of paid vacation time, and those who get it don’t always take it. (On average, workers fail to use nearly five vacation days a year, according to the U.S. Travel Association.) When a Vanity Fair/60 Minutes poll this summer asked Americans to choose the animal that most resembles them, 52 percent chose “worker bee”; just 4 percent picked “sloth.”
“There is always work to do, and the world will take from you everything you’ve got,” says Joyce, who’s 52. For all her worker bee qualities, she was lovely and gracious on our call, as though she had all the time in the world. This may be because, after 15 years in a high-stakes, high-pressure role, she finally has this work-life balance thing figured out.
When she was first elected, in 2000, she tried to tackle everything, arriving early at the office and speaking at neighborhood meetings nearly every night. At one point, amid a crush of nearly 30 holiday parties in a two-week stretch, she nearly fainted. “I kind of had an epiphany,” she says. “I was unhappy, and I felt like I wasn’t very effective. It was nobody’s fault but mine. I realized, I’m not going to accomplish what I want to accomplish in life if I don’t take care of my instrument: my mental, physical, and emotional health.”
Today, Joyce tries to keep a balance between the hours she works and the hours she’s off. It’s still mostly work, but she knows her limitations. “I’m a master delegator,” she says. “I’ve learned to delegate the things that other people can do better than I can, or as well but more efficiently.”
Mindfulness—once the purview of monks, now a corporate buzzword—has also made its way into Joyce’s life. She sets reminders on her phone to stretch every hour. If you walk into a meeting with her at 3 p.m., you may find a roomful of lawyers swinging their arms or touching their toes.
“It’s good to move around every once in a while,” Joyce says. “You have to set reminders for yourself. Otherwise, you’ll get carried away and forget.”
for cady macon, a St. Louis–based life coach, the world may be her oyster—but as one client told her, sometimes there’s too much oyster. In a land of opportunities, finding work-life balance is about focusing on the ones that matter rather than being run down by possibilities.
Call it career FOMO—short for “fear of missing out.” It’s what often drives us to say yes to more than we should, thinking that we’ll lose an opportunity—or, worse, lose business.
For freelance photographer Elizabeth Wiseman, keeping clients happy used to mean working whenever it was convenient for them. Now, as the mother of a 2-year-old, she’s curbed her flexibility, working in the studio just two days a week while her son is at day care.
“It’s scary because you think if you give your clients limitations, they’re going to reel in and go to someone else,” she says. Yet her business hasn’t been affected; she’s still meeting clients’ needs at the same pace that she did while working five days a week.
“There are a lot of people who understand that balance, more so than I thought before,” she says. “Part of it is just communicating well with your client. Being professional is also about being honest with your limitations.”
As Macon says, “Draw your line in the sand, or other people will draw it for you.” A mentor gave her that advice early in her career, and it still holds true—especially as mobile connectivity keeps us tethered to the office during off hours. More than half of all U.S. workers check their email before and after work and even during sick days, a survey by the American Psychological Association found.
State Rep. Stacey Newman spends roughly five months a year in Jefferson City, when the House is in session. Those days can be long and intense. When Newman leaves the office, she comes home to an apartment with no Internet. The decision to keep her Jefferson City home disconnected stems partly from a desire to be frugal and partly from an effort to be better balanced.
“It’s emotionally healthy for me,” Newman says. “I don’t usually get home till very late at night. I try to give my mind some downtime.”
When Newman and I spoke, she’d just returned from a gun violence–prevention summit in Washington with former Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. Newman is passionate about the issues that affect her constituents, particularly gun control and women’s rights. To do her job well, though, she’s learned to manage that passion.
The dynamics of politics, she says, means “moderating yourself in terms of when you need to be full-on with your energy.” Toward the end of session, when legislation is fast and furious, Newman says, she knows that there’s little “me” time—she’s typically at the Capitol until midnight.
“Colleagues I work with on both sides of the aisle, we’re there for a policy reason,” she says. “Most of us take that responsibility really seriously, and we try to manage our time on little sleep—but we know that we have to take care of ourselves, too.”
If time permits between hearings, Newman says, she and some of her female colleagues will lace up their walking shoes and take some brisk laps around the capital. “It’s exercise,” she says, “but it’s also a psychological tool to help us focus and come back for another five hours.”
Work-life balance isn’t just about laying out expectations for others; it’s also about being clear about your own expectations. “Your happiness is what happens,” says Macon, “less your expectation of what would happen.”
A cardiac surgeon at Saint Louis University Hospital, Dawn Hui is on call every other night and every other weekend. In the measure of work-life balance, her scales tip heavily toward work. And yet for Hui, this balance is far better than what she experienced in her residency, when 30-hour shifts were standard.
“It was basically bootcamp,” she says. “Now, what other people might perceive as a very difficult job is actually much easier than when I was in training.”
Hui’s expectations for personal time may be lower than most people’s, but her level of job satisfaction is high. “My job is who I am,” Hui says. “I’m very invigorated by work. We’re interacting with people and families at critical times every day. You don’t think of it as a burden.”
That sense of purpose can be a powerful driver in women’s careers. Though it doesn’t obliterate the need for work-life balance, it does reframe perspective in a way that makes the work aspect more rewarding.
“People consistently ask me, ‘Why do you do this?’” Newman says. “Women who have no healthcare and victims from gun violence are dealing with way more stress than I am. I try to put it into perspective—I’m doing a small piece of what can be done.”
Newman has four grandchildren under the age of 7. Spending time with them is both a reprieve from her job’s day-to-day intensity and a reminder of why she puts in the long hours.
“I look at where they are in life, and I realize how legislation that I work on will affect them,” she says. “Any sacrifice I make in being away from family is really impacting their lives.”
