No Work, No Life, No Kidding!

Scene One: Monday morning. Your eight-year-old daughter is sick with the flu. You and your spouse are in crunch mode at work. Which one of you stays home to take care of the kid?

Scene Two: Your team leader wants you at a meeting, 5 PM sharp. That's exactly when you're supposed to pick up your three-year-old from day care. What should you do?

Chances are, if you're married with children you've found yourself in predicaments like these, wondering if there really is any way to "balance" work and family.

The truth is, there isn't. You can't do even more for your job and your family. And in this economy, you certainly can't do less. All you can do is make trade-offs -- doing a lot of what you don't like so you can get to the stuff that you really care about. That means, for example, crashing on a deadline until two in the morning, which frees you to spend the weekend with the kids.

There really is no other solution to the work-versus-family dilemma. Most of us don't have the luxury of quitting our jobs in the hopes of finding a more humane workplace. So what follows are strategies for making trade-offs: tips and tactics that have been road-tested by three real-world couples. They live and work under very different circumstances. But they have this in common: each couple works as a team to come up with creative solutions that benefit both husband and wife. They still make sacrifices, but ones that won't compromise their family's well-being. And that's the best any of us can hope for.

The Dual-Career Couple

The Team: Rachel Silber, 35, quality assurance team leader at Ontos Inc., a Lowell, Massachusetts-based software company; Scott Lefton, 38, engineering director at Fishman Transducers, Inc., a Wilmington, Massachusetts-based audio equipment manufacturer.

Their Children: Jacob, 10; Talia, 7; and Gabriel, 4.

The Challenge: To be there for the kids -- without sacrificing their careers.

Lesson #1: Limit your flextime.

Six years ago, Silber was a computer programmer working on a crash project to fix the bugs in a program when Talia came down with the chicken pox. She decided to work at her office from midnight to 8 AM until her daughter recovered.

But Talia was home sick for a month, and Silber's night shift soon became a nightmare. She saw her coworkers so infrequently that when they changed the project's strategy, no one told her. At the end of the month, she discovered that the work she'd been doing into the early morning hours was largely unnecessary. "It was extremely demoralizing," she recalls. She quit five months later.

Now Silber makes sure she works the same core hours as her coworkers so she never falls out of the loop. "Flextime taken too far can get you in trouble," she says. "Unless you have 10 people supporting you, you need to be there when everyone else is."

Lesson #2: Manage your home commitments the old-fashioned way: create a paper trail.

Silber and Lefton feel strongly that the kids should be in after-school programs tailored to their individual interests -- not their parents' convenience. The trade-off? They must create a complicated patchwork of transportation arrangements and oversee them with military-like efficiency.

To keep straight which kid needs to be picked up where and when -- along with the play dates, school closings, and the holidays that wreak havoc on any parent's schedule -- they use a two-foot-by-three-foot, at-a-glance monthly calendar. It hangs on their kitchen wall, with all the relevant details (such as phone numbers) scribbled in for each day. So far, they haven't had any snafus.

Lesson #3: When a crisis hits, negotiate.

If you're a dual-career couple, it's a sure thing that a sick child, a snow day, or a looming deadline will blow up even the best-laid plans. When the unexpected inevitably occurs, Silber and Lefton aren't thrown into turmoil. They don't even argue. "We talk it out with each other, and we negotiate," says Lefton.

Typically, that means one parent will spend the morning in the office, while the other works in the afternoon. But if they both need to be at the office at the same time? "Whoever is in the biggest crisis gets to go," Silber says. Teenage sweethearts who've been married for 13 years, they think of themselves as a partnership rather than individuals vying for limited time. "We guard our core work hours jealously," she continues, "but we also have a strong commitment to help each other succeed."

Lesson #4: Overcommitting yourself can actually help.

You might think that managing three kids and two high-pressure jobs would overwhelm any couple. In fact, Lefton and Silber pile the work on, filling up every spare moment with hobbies and a small side business.

Are they crazy? Perhaps. But they've discovered that being overextended is a good thing. It forces them to weed out anything that's extraneous, and to focus on executing. It even energizes them. Work life, family life, and personal life, it turns out, need not always be at odds. "It helps," says Silber, "that we don't own a television."

Coordinates: Scott Lefton, slefton@worldstd.com ; Rachel Silber, rachel@worldstd.com .