Why a sustainable workload is the key to both professional and personal success. 

Talk to experienced project managers and they may tell you they struggle to maintain a healthy project management work-life balance. Particularly when faced with tight deadlines, demanding stakeholders, or project crises that require long hours and weekend work. 

If you are regularly working evenings and weekends however, the brutal truth is you are not balancing your work interests and commitments with your personal ones. Further more, chances are that this habit and expectation is spilling over into how you work with project team members.  

Double standards?

By the nature of their work, project managers have to be excellent at managing time and prioritising activities. So this starts with their own time and work. Right?

If a project manager regularly and habitually goes over time and budget on their project, their project management skills need work, regardless of what they have managed to deliver.   

However, Project managers will often justify working evenings and weekends to themselves and their families, by the deadlines they must meet. 

The truth is however, that if they and their team have to regularly to work evenings and weekends to meet a deadline, this is a failure on the projct manager’s part to plan and resource properly. 

What if the workload is simply too big?

But what if the workload is simply too large for the resources available? Employees generally are increasingly asked to do more with less and project manager are no exception. However, just because the project manager isn’t able to close the gap between the resources available and the workload doesn’t mean that there aren’t enough resources. 

Restoring project management work life balance

There are a number of avenues open to restoring project management work life balance including: 

• Reviewing and bearing down on the scope. Discussing ‘pruning’ and de-scoping, as necessary, to match the human resources and timelines in negotiations.
• Using Agile Project management methods such as the MoSCoW technique. To ensure the scope of works fits the time (human resource available). 
• Using Project soft skills to boost productivity. For example stream-lining project management tasks, and competing for and side-load additional resources, when using shared resource pools in matrix management environments. 
• Negotiating and pruning of the portfolio of projects a project manager is working on at any one time. 
• Delegating, streamlining project admin tasks, Time blocking etc and learning to be utterly ruthless with time and gracious with people.  
• Remembering that work expands to fill the time available. So by strictly controlling the time available, the lower priority tasks naturally get burned off by the essential. 
• Remembering that 80% of the value is delivered by 20% of the resources and the tasks performed. And learning to spot, challenge and cut work on high-cost low value or ‘nice to have’ deliverables. 
• Robustly and consistently resisting unfunded/resourced scope creep without corresponding descoping in other areas of the project. 

Weekend warriors

You will often hear people say that evening and weekend work is part of the job. But unless you must work evenings and weekends to complete works while customers and clients aren’t at work, and are already doing all of the above, you need to look closely at how you are managing the deadlines and resources. 

Six key imbalance areas in project management work life balance

Workload is one of the six key imbalance areas (workload, control, reward, community, fairness, and values) in the Areas of Work life (AW) model, which affect the level to which individuals experience burnout. Burnout not only damages your health but degrades your performance at work and is damaging to your career and longer-term prospects.  

Your responsibility to yourself and your family

Control is another key imbalance area. So it’s important to not only reduce your workload to a sustainable level but exercise the control you must, to do so. And that control doesn’t just extend to the suggestions listed above, to close the gap between workload and personal and project resources. It also extends to the following: 

1. Engaging with your line manager. To discuss the issues at a personal and job role – not just as a project challenge. 
2. Seeking out and engage with formal and informal mentors on the issue. 
3. Discussing the issue of work-life balance with your partner. So you can share how you are feeling and understand the impact on your partner and family. 
4. Seeking support early for healthcare professionals where your physical or mental health are affected.  
5. Seeking help and support for any unhealthy and unhelpful coping mechanism which you may have developed.  
6. Taking advantage of any relevant help and support offered by your company. 
7. Investing in personal resilience training to identify healthy coping strategies. 
8. Making sure your transition ‘kit’ is up to date. In case you are unable to bring the workload down to a sustainable level. So that you are well placed to seek a new role and enjoy a better work-life balance. 

Recognising and addressing bad habits

That said, regular evening and weekend work is sometimes simply a bad habit. One developed and rationalised and justified over time by the demands of ‘the project’ or ‘the job’.  

Using another client’s project resource to work on another project is professionally and morally unacceptable – so why is using the time and energy on project work, which should be spent meeting your commitment to yourself, family, friends, and community, be acceptable?  

Setting healthy boundaries for project management work life balance

As already mentioned, Parkinson’s law states work expands and contracts to fit the time available. So, having the discipline to ring-fence personal time and accept no excuses; concentrates the mind, whilst at work, on the essentials, and how to do more with less. It also ensures you are ‘present’ in your private life.  

It will be painful and stressful at times putting the ‘genie back in the bottle’, and bringing the hours you work down to sustainable levels, by developing new habits and learning new ways to be ruthless with time and gracious with people. 

If you keep your commitment however, to respect the time for yourself, family, friends and community, it will take your time management skills to the next level. It will also make you a better project manager in the process. And with commitment, training, and discipline, there will come a time when you not only don’t work on evenings or the weekends – you don’t think about work during those times either. 

Burn-out and health issues, do not a successful career make…

And if, despite your best efforts, the workload is still not sustainable you are well-placed to manage the impact on your health, personal, family and professional life, by pursuing new opportunities to develop your career in a role with a sustainable workload.   

Making that commitment, to a healthy work-life balance, and mastering the management of their own time, is a rite of passage for project managers on the road from good to great. Unlocking their potential to work on larger and more complex projects without burning out.

Click Here to subscribe to our mailing list and stay updated on the latest Articles, or browse some other great reviews below…