3 Guidelines for a Sustainable Work/Life Balance

Lonnie Pacelli is an Accenture/Microsoft veteran with four decades of learnings under his belt. He frequently writes and speaks on leadership, project management, work/life balance, and disability inclusion. Reach him at [email protected] and see more at ProjectManagementAdvisor.com.

  Career Development  

The Sustainable PM series focuses on four drivers for a holistic, long-term career:

1. Sustainable skills
2. Sustainable lifestyle
3. Sustainable relationships
4. Sustainable stewardship

In my first article of this series, I shared three essential pillars of career sustainability. This article focuses on the second driver: a sustainable lifestyle.

In 4 Ways Your PM Career Sustainability Can Go Wrong, Trish is a hard-charging project manager who seems to always be working. She believes she has balance because she takes time to eat and go to the gym. She works hard and plays hard. She has opportunities to dial it back a bit and not run so hard, but when she collapses while leading a Zoom meeting, the decision to dial it back is made for her.

You may know someone like Trish, or you may be a Trish—the PM who sends midnight emails and thinks work/life balance can be achieved by cramming more life into an already hectic work schedule.

Worse still is when the PM expects others to work like he does. I once worked with a PM who, when a project was in its last mile, brought his sleeping bag into a team meeting, slammed it down, and said he was going to sleep at the office until the product was released because he was so dedicated to the project. This made for a very uncomfortable meeting, as his words and actions implied that unless you did as he did, you somehow …

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