How to assess your current ‘life load’

Plus a new worksheet! I do love worksheets!

Hello and welcome to Academia Made Easier. I am so glad that you are here. 

Years ago, I read a magazine article with a real-life exchange that stuck with me. To the best of my undoubtedly faulty recollection, it went like this:

The author went to a fast-food chicken restaurant to pick up food for a work event. She approached the cashier and ordered multiple large barrels of chicken, baskets of fries, gravy, macaroni salad, coleslaw, biscuits, corn – the works. The cashier entered the order and asked, “Is this for here or to go?” The author incredulously asked the cashier, “Do you really think I could be ordering that to eat here by myself?” The cashier responded, “I don’t know your life.”

I don’t know your life.

I love this story for a few reasons. First, kudos to the cashier for being so non-food-judgy. We should all be free to order large buckets of grease and transfats if we want to and to enjoy them without judgment. Second, it is a fun reminder of a fundamental truth: I don’t know your life. You don’t know my life. All our lives are different, with unique challenges and joys, burdens and gifts, and these circumstances change constantly. 

None of us know each other’s lives, and often we don’t even know our own. We are all moving so fast that we fail to take stock of our life realities and consider how these impact our well-being, energy, and work. Taking stock of these realities allows us to identify opportunities to make our lives a bit easier, or at the very least to show ourselves more grace and compassion.

To this end, I find it useful to consider the idea of ‘loads’ – the cumulative effect of the various things weighing on your mind, occupying your calendar, and consuming your attention. In our work lives we call this workload, so for our non-work lives I guess we can call this our ‘life load’. Your life load includes your nonwork responsibilities, supports, and context. It also includes your often overlooked ‘mental load’, described by Randi Donahue as “the cognitive and emotional effort used to manage your life and, in many cases, the lives of others. It’s the planning, stressing, anticipating, preparing, and organizing that takes place in your head. And it’s often invisible to those around you.” In short, whatever is going on for you outside of work is part of your life load.

If this life load idea interests you, today’s small thing to try immediately is for you. 

One Small Thing to Try Immediately: Assess your ‘life load’

Academia, like other parts of the modern economy, can be prone to burnout culture. There are external and internal pressures to work harder, perform at a higher level, and excel on all fronts. In this context, it is easy to have work creep into every moment and aspect of our lives – particularly given that we carry our phones everywhere and rarely disconnect. But your non-work life – that is, your life – matters and deserves your attention. So try the following:

(1) Adopt a ‘life first’ mindset. A ‘life first’ mindset means that you are mindful of your life demands and seek to adapt your work to your life to the extent possible. When you take on new life and work opportunities, you are mindful of your current and anticipated future life demands and make choices, to the extent that you can, that take these life realities into account. 

Why life first? Work can be a great source of joy, fulfillment, and meaning. It is often key to our identities. It helps structure our days. It pays our bills and thus supports our lives and lifestyles. Work is called a ‘livelihood’ for good reason. I (usually) love working. Work is (often) awesome.

But work will never love you back. Your university will never love you back. Your discipline will never love you back. When you are gone, you might be missed or thought of fondly for a short period, but everything will continue to chip along. Yes, you are an amazing and wonderful researcher/colleague/teacher/scholar/leader. But you are also entirely replaceable. We all are. Organizations and systems are designed that way. It isn’t personal.

Given this, I ask Mary Oliver’s famous question: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” 

(2) Determine your current ‘life load’. To make current and future choices that are mindful of your life realities, you need to know what these are. To help you with this assessment, I created a Life Load Calculator worksheet. This reflection tool is intended to be entirely adaptable; if you don’t like the categories, change them; if you don’t like the scoring, change it. Because everyone’s life is so different, the worksheet won’t fit yours perfectly, so change it as you need. But whatever you do, please don’t skip the reflection questions, because this is where the potential magic happens. 

(Assessment tool folks: I invite you to help me improve the worksheet. I write this free newsletter on weekends and airplanes, and I am well aware my beta version worksheet has plenty of opportunities for improvement. Your input is welcome; see the worksheet for how to contact me about that.)

(3) Decide if, where, and how you want to make changes. Your current life load may be working well for you. If so, great (and congratulations)! You might have areas where you wish to lighten the load by sharing work with your partner, outsourcing work to a service, finding AI solutions, making different choices, and/or adopting a different mindset. If so, decide your easiest first step to move this forward. Work at your own pace; forward is forward. You might be in a situation in which your current life load is a lot. If this is you, I urge you to find ways to strengthen your support systems by talking with your doctor or mental health provider. The line between ‘overloaded’ and ‘overwhelmed’ can be thin and porous. Your well-being matters. You matter. Please do take care. ♥️

(4) Recognize that everyone else is dealing with their own life loads. To return to the chicken restaurant cashier, I don’t know your life. But I assume that as a human in this world, you have your own challenges and stresses, and/or that you have gone through your own challenges and stresses, and/or that you have challenges and stresses ahead of you that you are currently blissfully unaware of. (As I have written about before, we are all one unexpected medical diagnosis or one family member’s unexpected accident away from our lives turning upside down.) In the words of Canadian singer Sam Roberts, “there's no road that ain't a hard road to travel on.” Given that we all have our struggles, give the people around you some grace. You don’t know their lives.

Until next time…

Throughout this entire exercise, you may have been thinking, “yeah, but what about my workload, Loleen?!?!?” No worries, I plan to cover that in a future newsletter. Watch this space! (Now might be a good time to subscribe … just saying…) In the meantime, if you want some thoughts on work-life balance, consider reading some past Academia Made Easier newsletters: “How to stop apologizing for reasonable boundaries (sorry, fellow Canadians!)”, “How to harness your ambition to improve your work-life balance”, “How to take the weekend off”, and “How to stop working at 5 pm (or whatever time you prefer)”.

Stay well, my colleagues. 

P.S. Returning to Mary Oliver’s wonderful poem, a recent SALT blog post noted that Oliver’s poem is a tribute to enjoying the moment and seeing the beauty of nature, making “this poem is a little revolution, a provocative question mark beside the conventional answers to the query, What makes for a day well lived?” I think it is important for all of us to consider what counts as a well lived day. For me, a day well lived includes time outside, time with family, and – if the stars align – time with my neighbour dog buddy, Sammie. (Note: I mention Sammie’s story in my newsletter “How to find new hope when the world is … a lot”.) Here is a recent photo of one such well lived days. 

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Have you got your copy of my new book, For the Public Good: Reimagining Arts Graduate Programs in Canadian Universities? If not, please order it now (and/or ask your university library to get a copy), be sure to sign up for the related Substack “Reimagining Graduate Education”, and note that my coauthors and I welcome invitations to work with units to implement the book’s ideas! Reviewer feedback of note:  

• “It is the kind of quietly good book we need to see more of. … This book provides a very solid description of the process of defining and developing excellent, sustainable arts programs that serve students rather than academics. And not only is it dead-on in terms of its recommendations about how to design and evaluate programs, it has a lot of helpful matrices and worksheets to help those who are put in positions requiring them to do exactly that … More like this, please." - Alex Usher

• “Nearly half the book is dedicated to charting a transformative course for liberal arts departments.... If For the Public Good can provide the impetus for social sciences and humanities departments to refine their graduate studies programs, the career outcomes for tens of thousands of grad students will be the better for it. That alone would move the needle on Canada’s public good problem." - Literary Review of Canada