Work-Life Balance for Working Parents: What You Can Let Drop with Sarah Armstrong

Beyond the To-Do List - Productivity for Work and Life

Sarah Armstrong, Head of Global Marketing Operations at Google and author of The Art of the Juggling Act, joins Eric Fischer to discuss sustainable work-life balance for working

Key takeaways

• Sarah Armstrong's five-ball framework distinguishes work as a rubber ball that bounces when dropped, while family, friends, health, and spirit are glass balls requiring protection
• She enforced a non-negotiable 'Grace Time' calendar block from 6 to 8 p.m. daily, instructing her assistant never to schedule meetings during those hours

Main topics

• Work-life balance frameworks
• Boundary setting and protection

Notable quotes

"All you need to say is no. You do not need to explain to me why you can't attend this meeting because the minute you start explaining... I start judging you on whether or not that reason is better than what I've asked you to do."

Conclusion

The episode provides working parents with actionable, guilt-free strategies to prioritize what

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) I'm going to let you in on a little secret. My productivity weapon of choice is Brain.fm. It's built like a focus tool more than just a regular music app. It gives you functional music that gets your brainwaves in the right place for specific tasks. And I've been using it for years for many things. Sleep, focus, de-stressing, naps, admin work, creativity. This thing has it all, and I'm taking it everywhere I go with me on my phone, and you can too. Try it out at beyondthetodolist.com slash brainfm and get 20 % off, or go to the link in the show notes. Again, that link is beyondthetodolist.com slash brainfm and get 20 % off. Speaker 1 (1:00) And welcome back to Beyond the To-Do List, a podcast about productivity. I'm your host, Eric Fischer. My guest this episode has a book that on the cover, you look at it, there's five balls in the air. It's work, family, friends, health, spirit, and one of them is rubber. So if you drop work, it bounces. The other four are glass. She built a career around... That idea spent 20 years at Coca-Cola, now runs global marketing operations at Google. It's Sarah Armstrong, author of The Art of the Juggling Act, Bite-Sized Guide for Working Parents. Sarah, welcome to the show. Thanks for being here. Speaker 2 (1:43) Eric, so great to be with you. Speaker 1 (1:45) So you didn't get there from just... theory where you're at now, you got there from something you've been doing since you were 19 on a volleyball court. So before anybody called it juggling, take me back there. What did the juggling or where did this juggling muscle actually get built from? Was it grace or was it Georgetown? Speaker 2 (2:08) You know, I wouldn't attribute it to being a student athlete, actually. And, you know, all that you try to squeeze in your younger years. And I started playing multiple sports a year back, gosh, going back to middle school. And I do think you build a muscle, you build a way of juggling the things that you think are important to your life. And so at an early stage, I tried to figure out how I could fit it all in. And I probably refined that over those years of, you know, middle school into high school. And then into college, I played volleyball on scholarship at Georgetown and, you know, being a... a Division I college athlete, that's where you're getting paid to do that. So it was a job, in fairness, but it was also obviously a job to go to school. And how did you manage those two important things? And then as I transitioned into the working world, and actually I speak to, over the years, I've spoken to NCAA student-athletes about the skills you actually underestimate that you have built as a student-athlete as you go into, you know. life and figure out how you want to manage your career, because I think that there's a lot of transferable skills. So then I will say that you really have to refine it when you become a working parent. And I think that's one of the biggest challenges in life. And, you know, I've reflected over the years, actually, that we learn about a lot of different things in school and as we do grow up, but we don't learn about parenting in school. You know, there's not, you're not taking classes on that. And you don't learn about how to manage your career in school. You learn, you study something to do in your career, but how to manage your career. And actually, I think they're two of the most important aspects of life that you're going to try to do both at the same time. And you really want to do them well. But I think the challenge is how do you do them in a healthy and happy way? And I see a lot of young parents in my day to day over the years that have been maybe surviving and not thriving in that because there's so much pressure to do both well. Speaker 1 (4:05) Yeah, there's so much of a You better learn this by having it modeled to you. But the models are rare, right? Speaker 2 (4:16) Yes. I do think the models are rare. And I think because of the pressures we put on ourselves collectively as a society of how we're supposed to show up in both of those aspects of our life. And then the combined picture of those two kind of pictures is where the models are really hard to see. who has done it well. And so quite honestly, I cannot claim to have all the answers that I've done it perfectly, but I've really, to your point, been studying it for 30 plus years and have really tried to figure out what it looks like to actually now say 30 plus, Grace is 24. But I was, in fairness, watching working parents around me in my early stages of my career to say, how do you do this? Like, how do you make all of these pieces work? And so, yeah, it is a really interesting challenge to take on, but I fundamentally believe there's a way to do it so that you and your children and your relationships can be healthy and happy and that you also can really just enjoy the journey, enjoy life as you're doing it and have a very fulfilling life along the way. Speaker 1 (5:14) Well, let's go back to even further than volleyball and high school. Let's go back to six-year-old you and your dad's. hospital CEO office because you already knew you wanted both career and family. You just didn't know the what of it. And where did that certainty come from that early and even that semi-specific? Speaker 2 (5:40) Yeah, it's funny. Yeah, Speaker 1 (5:41) I Speaker 2 (5:41) have this memory, very vivid memory. Probably one of Speaker 1 (5:43) my Speaker 2 (5:43) earliest memories is my dad was a hospital CEO. He took me to the hospital and brought me into his office. He needed a big desk. And I sat behind it and I have this vivid memory of saying, I want to run something. Like it was this little thought that I had. But I also did know from a very early age, I wanted to have children and have a family and all those things. So it was, you know. The combination of those two over the course of my life that were guiding principles that I was going to try to do both. And in fairness, I have two amazing parents, but my mom was a nurse, but she stayed home with us from the age of seven on and I have two younger brothers. So I don't have a ton of memories of her working in fairness, but I have wonderful memories of her being home with us. But I was looking to potentially. carve a different path. And in my younger years, there weren't a lot of women in my life that were working moms. And so I didn't have as much of that. I had a couple that I could see, but it was my first job out of college where I worked for a woman who had two young children. She was really kind of a guiding force in me looking at it. I'm like, okay, I can do this. And she was operating at a very high level. within Leo Burnett, the agency that I worked at. And so that was kind of, she became my role model. Speaker 1 (7:02) Well, speaking of Leo Burnett, so you went from there to Coke to McKinsey and now Google and each one of those, you know, you level up in a sense career wise, but also your family is still growing in number and maturity and age and all that. So how did all of that as you're going through before we get into like tactics and things? How did the model refine or how did you notice and refine as you went through each of those opportunities? And let's call them escalations, promotions. Speaker 2 (7:38) Yeah, you know, it's interesting. I talk about the fact that we need to, as parents, think about what our working parent operating model is, you know, and what that looks like when your children are newborns in those early toddler years. It evolves as they age and evolves in terms of what your children need. And it also evolves in terms of what you potentially need as a parent in those moments. And as you're managing your career, there are times along the way where that operate. I said every year I tried to evaluate it to say, what do we need this year? I didn't look too far out. It's like, what does this year need? Because every year had its own unique nuances. And I do think that the needs and the. some of the complexities change over the course of years, both in terms of, to your point, the intensity of what was happening for me from a career standpoint, but also in fairness, when Grace was seven, I went through a divorce. So I went from being in a two. income household and two-parent household into becoming a single working mom, which was definitely not part of the plan, but life happens. And with that, then we were co-parenting across two households, which had its own considerations. So through all of the different ebbs and flows of life, I think you do have to kind of stop and evaluate each year. What is it that you really need? What is it that your children need? And how do you make sure those needs can be met from the different angles? Speaker 1 (8:57) So the muscle is real. It's been tested and refined. And, you know, there are times where it's like, oh, I got to get back in the gym, metaphorically, so to speak. Right. And some of the aspects of that muscle and this balance for you is that balance is personal, that imbalance is allowed and that guilt and perfection are the enemy. Let's talk about your definition of balance because you call it. Speaker 1 (9:27) atypical. And even for years, you'd say that was fitting in as much as you could and evenings included. And a lot of people would say that's not balance. Speaker 2 (9:36) You're right. I always say everyone's definition of balance is different. And I definitely had my own definition. I think for my standpoint, I do think that the ability to figure out how I wanted to fit all that I wanted to do in life, because I was throughout my career, I was in a global role. Okay, first of all, so I was traveling the world for portions of a month. And so what that looked like in terms of fitting in that type of travel and also raising Grace, my daughter. So that was a piece of it. I also think that I wanted to make sure I had a life outside of the office and had my friendships and my relationships that were strong. And so I really tried to carve out time for that as well. But in terms of what I call the transference of hours, because sometimes everyone feels like you have to get everything done. And again, this is you have to think of the course of my career, you know, over a 30 plus career. in the early parts of America, you were in the office. Like we didn't, you know, this really dates me. We didn't have laptops there. You didn't get to bring your work home. You got to do it in an edit, edit, ask in an office. So I think that the evolution of the working model has obviously changed a lot. But if you look at where and how you needed to get your work done and throughout the course of my career, that did shift. And, but I made a very strong commitment when I had Grace that there were, she was only going to get me for a couple of hours. of a given day. But I really protected those hours. And I talk very openly about the concept of boundaries and how do you set and protect those boundaries that you think are important for your life. And that allowed me to contribute to the way that I wanted to balance my life. And I use balance in air quotes. And the interesting thing is a lot of people say, oh, I have boundaries. And I ask them, but have you told anyone about your boundaries? Because you can set boundaries for yourself, but if you don't tell others in your life that you have those boundaries, they're going to step right on them or right over them. And so I think the concept of like thinking about what your boundaries are, setting them and protecting them is key. And so for me, I had an evening 6 to 8 p.m. block on my calendar, and it was called Grace Time. And her name was Grace. So it worked well. And those were untouchable hours from a work standpoint. And I would say to my assistant, if someone wants to talk to me at 9 p.m., great. If they want to talk to me at 8 a.m. after carpool, great. But 6 to 8 p.m., that's Grace's time. And I really worked hard to protect that. Speaker 1 (12:07) Well, those boundaries kind of are seasonal, it seems to be. You write that imbalance isn't an if, it's a when. Things are going to. imbalance themselves or you won't notice right so and