In Search of Work-Life Balance
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Kimansi Constable remembers feeling a lot of pressure growing up. His mother had come to the U.S. from Kenya, his stepdad from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. So two immigrant parents with a focus on the importance of getting a high-profile career as like a doctor or a lawyer. The expectations changed when his parents became very religious.

And their focus shifted from the high profile career to you need to be in ministry, you need to be a pastor or evangelist or something to that effect.

And when I told them I didn't want to go that path, they asked me to leave my home. So at 17, Kamanzi left. He became homeless and work was no longer about prestige or a career. It was now about survival. He stayed at a homeless shelter in Chicago and worked three jobs. He met his first wife at work.

They were married right after Kimanzi turned 18, and then they found a place to live. They both worked around the clock to make ends meet. And then outside of the work, it was a lot of just vegging in front of the TV and not really having a life outside of work. Then Kimanzi caught a break. A friend helped him get a job at Pepsi. He got his commercial driver's license and started driving big trucks, delivering soda. And he liked the work.

It was actually enjoyable work. I got to drive the semi. I made what I would consider real money. I was seeing something different every day. I had health insurance. That was probably the first time where work was really enjoyable for me. It also made him proud.

Just the name, the prestige of the name was something. And family and friends, when they found out that I drove for Pepsi, it was just so prestigious. And so when somebody asked me, it was a thing of pride. That was probably the beginning of me really tying my identity to work.

Kimanzi moved on to another company. He soon realized that a lot of truck drivers were independent contractors, but they were so swamped with work that they could never take time off.

So he came up with a business idea of his own, providing fill-in services for those drivers. It was an immediate success, and more and more of his identity became wrapped up in work. Because I was now a business owner, I was making over six figures. Nobody in my family was an entrepreneur, so I was the only one and everything.

work and that business was my everything. Soon he had five employees. Kimanzi kept working harder and harder. He and his wife had three children and their bills were getting bigger. Demand for the trucking services was always high, but there were definitely growing pains. For example, one year Kimanzi had a huge tax bill to pay off that he hadn't anticipated and his health started to take a hit.

even though he was still so young. I was always up at midnight to be on the bread truck delivering bread for somebody else's row. So the work-life balance piece was pretty much non-existent. My wife had to quit her job so she could stay home and be with the children. That kind of put a strain on the finances. So the first few years were a little rough.

But as the years went on, the debt started to pile up. I got into unhealthy habits. I'm delivering bread at midnight every night. I'm drinking two 44-ounce Mountain Dews, not sleeping well. It really took a toll on me over the years. After 12 years of doing this work, Kimanzi was 170 pounds overweight. He had developed type 2 diabetes. His mental health was in a really bad place.

And finally, he reached a breaking point. I remember I was on a couch. The kids were in school. I was reading a book called 48 Days to the Work You Love. It was a book that I found at a thrift store. And I just picked it up because I thought the title was interesting. And it was by an author named Dan Miller, who's since passed away. And he was talking about that our life is meant for more than work.

And I was reading this book, crying, like just crying, bawling my eyes out on this couch, like about everything that he was saying about our life is supposed to be more than work. There's more than how we earn money. There's our health. There's our family. There's all these other considerations for life. And I knew that I had none of those things at all.

It's easy to get completely absorbed into work to make it a top priority. There are always pressing responsibilities, never-ending to-do lists and deadlines. We skip going out with our friends because we have to get up early the next morning. We feel stressed out on vacation because there is a big project looming. We're walking away from our kids' ballgame because there is an important call we have to take. We're not able to get up early because we have to get up early.

We reschedule doctor's appointments to make it to a client meeting. It just ends up creeping into every part of your life. And before you know it, you forget to come up for air. On this episode, work-life balance and why it's so hard to find.

Let's stick with entrepreneur and writer Comanze Constable's story. Reading on the couch that day, he had his first epiphany about work and what role it had taken on in his life. He decided that day that he had to figure out another way to make money, a new career. It took a few years, but he saw an opportunity in creating digital information products like e-books and guides.

he realized he could earn money with his mind, not his body. And even though I never went to college, I have a GED, I'm a high school dropout with a GED, I knew that I had knowledge that I had spent the last 10 years learning

And I want to go back for a moment to that epiphany you had on the couch.

What was it about that idea, like you are more than you work? There is more to life than work. What was it about that that hit you so hard? It hit me because I had three beautiful children. I had a great extended family. I had good friends. We had traveled a little bit, gone to some vacations. So I'd seen a little bit of the world. I knew that there was more to life than punching that clock or what I did to work.

And if all that I was was my work, that would kind of just be a really sad existence for me because I had more value to offer the world than just being on that truck. And that's what that book really helped me see was you have value to the world that's behind the bedrock. You have value to your family as a father, to your friends as a friend, and you're not living out any of that. All you're doing is spending your entire life

Building a business that you hate at this point, you've let your body go, you've let your mind go. There has to be a better way. And once you made that decision, like I am going to change something, how did you begin to take charge of your health, your mental health, your wellness to sort of prepare you for the next step in your journey? The first step was getting accountability. So I had two friends, two close friends at the time, and I told them, look, I can't live life like this alone.

anymore. I want to get into better shape. I want to get into better financial shape. I want to really change my life. And I'm like, can you hold me accountable? So we agreed to have meetings every single week where we'd hold each other accountable to our goals. We would go for walks, play basketball, we'd exercise together, just doing more everyday life things that were fun versus like saying, hey, I'm going to go to the gym and do X, Y, Z. I worked on lifestyle changes in what I eat and

and just really focused on eating whole foods and not any of the junk. And over that three-year period, I did end up losing close to 170 pounds. Wow.

And how did you start to feel? Did you feel lighter in every which way? Oh, yes. Once I was eating better, what I did not realize at the time was with diabetes and higher blood sugar, it was affecting my mood because insulin is a hormone. So once my blood sugar started to come down and I got the junk out of my body and I felt better, I just felt better as a human being. And once I felt better, then I was more motivated to

work on transitioning to something else, to work on being there for my kids' activities. I got better sleep. It just helped me all the way around. And what did the people around you notice? What did they say to you? Oh, they're like, you're not a jerk. You're actually a pleasant person to be around. How do you mean? Were you a jerk before? Yeah. When your blood sugar is really high, you can be very irritable.

And a lot of things can irritate you. So I don't know that I would, if they were joking, if I was really that much of a jerk, but I wish a more pleasant person to be around. And also the conversations that I want to have. They weren't just about work and business. They were about life and love and deeper thoughts. And it was really detaching my identity from my work. It almost sounds like

In the early part of your life, you viewed yourself like a machine and you functioned like a machine, like go, go, go, go, go. And then the machine comes to life. What's funny is so many people told me that they thought of me as a machine. So it's kind of funny to hear you say that because it was all I focused on was what's the next thing? Like, what's the next thing that I got to do?

As Kimanzi built his new business, he and his wife moved to Hawaii, but their relationship frayed. Eventually, they divorced. He remarried and had two more children with his new wife. And it was his kids who eventually pointed out something important to him. Sure, he was healthier, his schedule was much better because he was not working nights, but he was still working way too much.

He had also started doing consulting work with business owners, and he was always trying to make his clients happy and his kids let him know about it. Oh, dad, like is work your entire life? All right. You have to be doing that right now. Don't you have a life outside of work? Like they would say that without thinking. I'm like, whoa, like, hey, that kind of hurts.

And they would say, you know, I would talk about clients and a client did X, Y, and Z. And they're like, well, why don't you fire them as a client? Nobody said they have to be your client. Watching his kids get jobs and pursue careers taught Kimanzi more important lessons about the role of work.

Lessons he took seriously. I would ask them about work. I'm like, hey, how was work? Anything exciting happen? They're like, no, I earned enough money so that I can do what I want to do. And that was it. They just didn't attach their identity in the way that I did. And then as they got older and started going to college, they would get internships and other jobs that were more in the office. And their attitudes very much changed.

The conversations that we had were very much they wanted to punch the clock. They wanted to earn the money that they needed to earn. But their biggest focus was enjoying life, living life like they did not see work the way that I saw it or that I was taught to see it. And did that bother you?

It puzzled me. At first, it very puzzled me. I couldn't understand because I kept thinking like as they would quit jobs. And I learned not to be judgmental of my children. I learned that they are individuals who

There are some things they just have to figure out in life on their own, right? If you want to quit a job and you don't have money to pay for, let's say, some fun thing, that's a life lesson you're going to have to learn. But they always managed to have enough for what they needed. So it just kind of puzzled me that they didn't see work the way that I saw it. It was very puzzling at first. And then what did you learn or how did you grow in the exposure of that?

As I talked to them more and then I saw them kind of charting their paths towards what they wanted to do in life. So they started college and it might have been under one major, but then it was another like my oldest graduated with a degree in computer science and he loves computers and that's all he wants to do. My second oldest daughter is a communication major and she actually wants to teach in

in other countries. She wants to go to Thailand and other countries and teach there. Just as they figured out their path and charted their path, it went from puzzling to inspiring to me because it really, then I started asking myself, I worked so hard to get to this point now where I actually have a business that I love and a life that I love and I have a lot of freedom. What do I want to do with that life?

them living their life helped me really ask those questions for myself. Are you able to let go of the work more often now where if you have free time, you enjoy it? If you're at work, you do the work, that kind of thing? Definitely. I'm not going to lie and say that I'm 100% like can be hands-free because that's just not the truth. But I would say that now I have a healthier perspective. Whereas the difference is,

Back then, so let's say even a few years ago, before I really had these conversations with my Gen Z children, I would respond to clients at 10 p.m. at night. I would be doing something at midnight, right, for the business. I would be working on the weekends and stuff like that. And now I never work on the weekends. I don't ever work on Saturday or Sunday. Saturday is a date night with my wife.

We go spend the whole day getting massages, do fun things, read books. There's no work at all. Sunday, no work at all. It's just a complete me day where I could veg out, watch the movies and have fun. Work hours are nine to five in the business. So if any client has anything that's urgent or anything like that, it's not happening outside of those normal hours. So those boundaries are set. And then I think the biggest thing that my Gen Z children taught me is

the mindset for what work is for. So for me, it used to be my identity. Now I see work as an ends to a means. And that means for me is having enough savings and investments and different revenue streams so that by the time I'm 50, I'm 44 now, I can be completely retired. I want to be retired by I'm 50. I don't want to work at all.

after 50 years old. So my goal has been in these last couple of years up till 50 to get enough saved and invested so that I can be completely done by 50. All right. So here's my prediction. I think you're going to retire and then start something new. Well, I'm a writer first and foremost, which is why we're having this conversation. So there's about 10 books that I want to write. Kimanzi Constable is an entrepreneur and writer.

We're talking about work-life balance. Coming up, a physician opens up about her struggles with setting boundaries, wanting to be present for her patients, but also feeling annoyed with constant calls and texts. I was mad. I was mad at myself for giving my cell phone number out in the first place. I was mad at myself for giving my cell phone number out in the first place.

I was mad that my patient had used my number to ask casual questions even after I told them that I was on vacation. That's next on The Pulse.

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Service fees apply for three orders in 14 days. Excludes restaurants. This is The Pulse. I'm Maiken Scott. We're talking about work-life balance. Many physicians want to be responsive when their patients have questions or concerns. But at the same time, having your phone blow up during family dinners or on weekend mornings can get kind of annoying.

How do you balance your obligations to your patients with your own need for rest? Let's listen to an excerpt from the podcast series Only Human from Hippo Education. In this episode, host Netta Freya, a physician in Maryland, explores the struggle with setting boundaries. Years ago, I was on vacation at the beach with my family. I remember being at a little pizza place on the boardwalk with my husband and son, who was three years old at the time.

We were all in our swim gear and flip-flops and covered in sand. And I got this phone call. A patient I had given my cell phone number to was calling me with some non-urgent questions. So I got up and left the pizza place. I went outside and I talked to my patient while my family started eating.

Afterwards, I felt overwhelming resentment. I was mad. I was mad at myself for giving my cell phone number out in the first place. I hadn't wanted to do it, to be honest, and I'd felt a little pressured by this patient when they asked for my number. They'd said that they had all their other doctor's cell phone numbers, and it made them feel more comfortable to have a way to reach me in emergencies. Well, now I regretted giving in to that pressure. I was so frustrated.

I was mad that my patient had used my number to ask casual questions even after I told them that I was on vacation. So much of working in medicine is being available to other people all the time. I thought, can't I have even a few days off? We had recently asked clinicians to record their thoughts on boundaries during a medical education conference, and people shared their different experiences around this issue.

Full disclosure, I give my email address, my work email, to all of my patients, which some people say, you know, don't do that. But I actually think people don't abuse it. They're generally pretty respectful. Texts, emails, and the like, it is...

Both a benefit, but also a big burden at the same time. Oh, yes. Patients will email you and if you don't or message you and if they don't get an answer in an hour, they're calling the office saying, I messaged Dr. Balteira. She hasn't gotten back to me. What's the holdup? And then there's my friend Nirav Shah, a pulmonologist, critical care physician and professor at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. For me personally,

That's part of my identity. Taking that call to me is part of who I am. And it doesn't empty my bucket to do it. Nirov invites his patients in. He gives them his cell phone number, his email address.

He responds pretty quickly when they reach out to him, no matter where he is. I've taken phone calls or answered text messages from have been Marco Island, right, on a beach vacation. We were on vacation in Greece and it was in the middle of the night. And I was like, I can't wake up this hotel room with my family to answer this. I remember vividly a time in the winter we were in Killington and I was on a ski lift and I glanced down at my watch and I saw a message from a patient.

To be honest, comparing my reaction to Nirov made me feel pretty horrible about myself. Like, why couldn't I be a better person? What was he doing so right that I was doing wrong? So I tried to get to the heart of this exact question with Nirov. He explained one piece of what drives him to be so available to his patients is that he wears a lot of different hats in his job. He teaches, he does research, he does clinical work.

And so his patients may have to wait weeks or even months to see him. So once they're in, he wants them to feel like he is all theirs. Separately, another reason is that years ago, his father was sick in the ICU and then passed away.

This experience really informed how Nirav views interacting with patients and their families when they are most vulnerable. And so the time that I give them and the time that they have access to me is one part of that. But the other part of that is, is that in a 30-minute appointment or a 40-minute appointment or 15 minutes,

Oftentimes you walk out, how many times have we walked out of a room and thought, oh my gosh, I just thought of the most important question to me that I knew I wanted to ask, but I didn't get a chance to ask it.

And maybe this stemmed from my own personal experiences with my family and my dad when he was sick and knowing that I was the healthcare person in that relationship and my family had me to ask those questions to and thinking about how would it feel if you didn't have someone to ask that question to. And so I want to make sure that my patients have an outlet for that question. When you get emails and texts from your patients, are you ever like, ugh?

Or do you get all of this sensory input and say, oh, okay, I just need to call so-and-so back? What is your visceral feeling when you get all of those messages? For the most part.

It doesn't bother me. It's one of those things where I've set the expectation for most of them that if it's not something that I need to get back to you right away with, I will get back to you when I can. But I would say that the overwhelming amount of times I feel very comfortable with saying that I can find two minutes in between what I'm doing. I can't say that everyone around me always feels like that. They might feel like, you know, you're on vacation. What are you doing? So it is an interesting thing.

kind of dichotomy of what I feel, plus what people around me feel, plus what my patients feel in terms of what this is to have access. Do you ever resent it if a colleague of yours

draws very clear boundaries with their patients and is not available on vacation, for example, so you're fielding their patients' calls on top of your own, do you ever secretly think, oh, that person is not doing their work? I don't because I can appreciate that my way is not the right way for everybody. And that if we want to provide excellent care to our patients, each of us has to decide what that is for us.

By nature of who we are, we have a lot of colleagues and friends and family. And everybody does stuff just a little bit differently. And I think that that's completely okay. And I can't expect what works for me to work for someone else. How do you think each clinician can figure out what their happy medium is? Because many of us, and I'm thinking of myself here,

end up sort of swinging between different extremes of boundaries, where for a long time in my career, I was very open, very porous with my boundaries because I wanted to do the right thing and I thought it was the right thing to do. And then I became resentful and

And then sometimes you swing in the opposite direction and you say, I'm never checking the patient messages over the weekend. And then that doesn't feel right either. So it's kind of been a many years to decades long journey of figuring out who do I want to be in terms of availability to my patients? What do you think each clinician can do to figure that out for themselves?

I think you hit it on the head when you said that there's like this pendulum that swings from being open and having people have your number or your email and then to say, "No, I can't do this." I think that that results in us being truthful with ourselves about where we are in our life, where we are in our journey at work, where we are in our journey at home. When my kids were younger,

They required a lot more of my time. And I wouldn't have been able to give as much of myself at that time because while I was important at work, I was even more important at home. And so the balance there is that you have to be truthful with yourself and with your patients. But that takes a little bit of introspection and being honest with yourself.

I liked what Nirav said about the need to be truthful with ourselves, about where we are in our life, in our journey at work and at home. Last year, I decided to take a few months off from patient care to give myself time to recharge after years of feeling overwhelmed by my inbox. It was the first time I had ever taken that kind of a break.

Now I'm back to seeing patients and I feel so much better. I've gotten better at establishing healthier boundaries for me. And I hope these boundaries allow me to keep practicing medicine for a long time. That was physician Netta Freya with an excerpt from the podcast series Only Human from Hippo Education. The series was edited by Ian Parman.

You're listening to The Pulse. I'm Maiken Scott. You can find us wherever you get your podcasts. Why do we often feel so guilty when we're trying to draw clear boundaries between work and the rest of our lives? Or when we just need a break?

It may be because of the lasting influence of what German sociologist Max Weber called the Protestant work ethic. Which was invented by Puritan ministers in the 16th and 17th centuries. That's philosophy professor Elizabeth Anderson. The Puritans also, we have to recognize, they were the killjoys of the 16th and 17th century. Yes.

You know, the Catholics, they're having all these festivals and celebrations and feasts and holidays. The Puritans really weren't into that. They didn't even like celebrating Christmas. And I guess when you're working hard, you're less likely to get yourself in trouble. Oh, absolutely. That was a big part of their vision, right? Nose to the grindstone, and then your mind will not be distracted by temptations and sin. ♪

Weber argued that modern capitalism was influenced heavily by the Protestant work ethic, that people had internalized these religious ideas about work, tying work to morality. He stressed all the negative aspects of the work ethic. You have to work hard and relentlessly, only rest to the extent necessary to recharge your batteries so you can get back to work again.

You should save your money, focus on earning a lot of money, but not really spend it on luxury or vacations or anything like that. Maybe reinvest it in your business. So it was an ascetic doctrine where you're not really supposed to have pleasure in this life. Elizabeth says these values also affect our attitudes toward taking time off.

In the early versions of the Protestant work ethic, you only rest to get back to work. But of course, that concept has changed. And I would say, especially with younger people, there is more of a demand for real balance between life and work. Does that remain challenging for us?

Oh, completely. Well, the United States is the only rich country in the world that does not have a government guarantee of paid vacation for every worker. I mean, even Japan, which is notoriously hard working place, has a few guaranteed paid vacation days.

The United States has zero that are government guaranteed. All of our vacation days are secured only through the employment contract. Many, many workers have no paid vacation in their employment contract. Only about half of American workers have a contractual provision for paid vacation and

And if you just look at their utilization of their guaranteed vacation days, Americans leave a lot of vacation on the table.

I think largely because they fear that if they use all of their guaranteed vacation, people won't miss them in the office and they'll be first to be fired. But I think beyond that, even when we can take time off and we're even encouraged to take time off, even then there is like a certain guilty feeling around it.

Oh, absolutely. There's, yes, people feel, oh, I, you know, I'm dumping all these duties on my co-workers or they feel like they should be useful. That's very work ethic kind of thinking. Whereas Europeans really, you know, know how to take their pleasures.

How much of this is tied, you think, to, I guess, a feeling of personal responsibility or conscientiousness?

You know, if I think about myself, I think one of my defining qualities is that I always feel responsible for everything. And I'm like very conscientious about my work. And I'm like, oh, I forgot this. I forgot that. And I hate it. Right. So how much of this is kind of like

a personal thing, you know, how much responsibility we take on, how responsible we feel, which then turns into this really dedicated work ethic, I guess, at the end of the day. Well, I can totally relate to this idea of responsibility because I feel exactly the same thing. But if you are in a job which you don't even expect to last very long,

It's harder to take responsibility for the organization because, hey, they're treating you like a disposable instrument. Why should you go and think that you have anything more to do than just whatever the minimal tasks are to avoid getting fired? And even some tech workers are like that. It's pretty notorious in the tech industry that a lot of tech workers are holding down two full-time jobs, but of course they can only do that

online, right, when they're not being supervised. And also they're kind of skimming in the sense that, you know, they're doing the minimum necessary. They're getting the job done, but not really going the extra mile or adopting a special sense of responsibility to their employer. I do wonder sometimes, though, if a lot of this thinking about work-life balance, right,

If it adds a layer of stress, especially for people who do work in jobs that they enjoy, where there's a lot of thinking involved, a lot of kind of iterating and trying to get through a difficult problem.

And then we're trying to create this firm boundary, like now I'm having fun and now I'm working and now I'm going to have my weekend, right? Like, I just find that stressful. And sometimes I just want to work. Oh, totally. Yeah. So in philosophy, we have this notion of the hedonic treadmill, right? The relentless pursuit of pleasure, you know, work hard, play hard kind of ideology that can be very stressful. I mean, why do you have to play hard? Right.

Why can't you just lay back and just daydream? In a way, the work hard, play hard ideology itself is turning play into a kind of work. Elizabeth Anderson is a professor of public philosophy at the University of Michigan. Her latest book is Hijacked, How Neoliberalism Turned the Work Ethic Against Workers and How Workers Can Take It Back. ♪

How do you handle the idea of rest, breaks, and balance when you love your work and it's fun for you? I talked about that with Bon Koo. He's a professor at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia. He's a researcher, an emergency room physician. I've been familiar with his work for years, and he's always doing some new and exciting project. Do the people who are closest to you in your life, do they say to you that you

You work too much? People who don't know me say I do work too much or you're extremely hardworking. People who know me well say that's just who I am. If I didn't do that, I would not be happy. Right. It's like how your brain is wired. Yeah. Yeah. So what else can I do for you?

That's my brain. Because like some people want to like they have a retirement plan at age like 68, age 70. They want to retire. I actually don't want to retire. I want to continue doing work that inspires me, that is able to change the world. And yeah, I don't have a retirement plan. Bon doesn't worry about how much time he spends working. For me personally, work-life balance is a myth.

On weekends, I like to get up in the morning and actually, quote, work. Because I just find it fascinating, the type of research that I'm doing, looking at designing the future of health and healthcare. So it's something that doesn't really seem like work for me, because it's something that really...

inspires me, I'm passionate about, it's creative to me. Bon is doing a lot of research now about improving health care, access to care, or how health care settings look and function. He cares deeply about that work, so to him, it doesn't feel like a chore. So I think for me, that's a key, to make it seem like work isn't really like work. And

That way, this artificial work-life balance, I think that's almost impossible for 80% of us to get. I was like, well, why not make work not seem like work? And how do you make sure you don't overcommit yourself? What have you learned about that to kind of keep work in a place where it's manageable and it feels good? I've only learned that recently to say no is easy.

Power, it has been a game changer in my life to be able to say no to people, to be able to say no to opportunities. And that has really saved me from burning out. Talk a bit more about that. Why was that so hard early on? And how do you do it now? Because it's a practice. Maybe I'm just getting older. Yeah.

Many of us are ambitious and we want to take advantage of every single opportunity out there. And I felt at a period of my life, I was burning out by just chasing after too many work opportunities, too many research opportunities where I had to narrow that down and start saying no. And it's a little scary for some people to say no to an opportunity, but it's

We feel like we're closing a door, but it actually opens up doors in life as well. And what's the fear? If you think about what was the fear when I didn't say no? Fear that I am going to not be able to take on a research opportunity that I want to, to be able to explore a different area of research where a lot of research I do is cross-disciplinary. And, you know, I work with like

architects, I work with designers, and I'm always thinking about, oh, what if we can do this? And the fear that I'll just be missing out because it's passion-fueled curiosity that drives me to exploring different disciplines. So what do you do now before you say yes? Have you created a process? I wish I had a process. Yeah.

What I try to do is I try, like many of us, our schedules are dictated by an online calendar. And I want to make sure throughout the week that I am having chunks of unstructured time.

And then when I see I'm taking on too much, it's when those chunks of unstructured time start disappearing from my calendar. Then that's when work seems like work. Tell me more about this importance of unstructured time for you. What does that do for you?

If we don't have unstructured time, we can't do deep work. We don't make time for creativity. We don't let time for our imaginations to wander. And I think that's an important thing that we need to build into our schedules on a daily basis. And then what do you do during your unstructured time?

My brain wanders and I allow it to wander. We can't always do that during a work week, right? There's like meetings and projects and deadlines. But for example, lately, I've been thinking about how we can redesign our food infrastructure in this country. And that has led me to speak to chefs, speak to plant scientists,

And thinking about how we can have, you know, how my patients can eat healthier because that would reduce the risk of chronic diseases. So that's an explorer. I am not a plant scientist. I'm not a food scientist. I took one hour of nutrition in medical school. But what I do know is that a healthy diet, a nutritious diet is so critical to human health.

And so I allow some unstructured time so I can explore this area and see if I can make connections. And to come back to this idea of work-life balance, what are some other things in your life that you enjoy? Because it sounds to me like you get a lot of joy out of your work. I can totally relate to that. I get a lot, a lot, a lot of joy out of doing my work. But then sometimes I'm like,

I don't have any hobbies. Well, I am an avid surfer. So even though I live out in the East Coast here, surfing to me is a way for me to be in nature. I travel the world to go surfing and I

It's a way that I could just focus on one activity, catching a wave. I can't be on my phone. I'm not searching the web and have to be 100% focused because if you're not, it's a little bit dangerous because you could drown.

And it's almost like a hard reset for my brain. And for some people, that hard reset might be taking a walk in the woods. It might be getting together with friends. But sometimes my brain can only reset during a surf session. It's like, you know, when your computer is sluggish, you have so many tabs open and it's like not working. You just got to power it down, power it back up. That's what surfing does to me. It resets my brain.

Bonku is an emergency physician, a researcher and a professor at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia. Coming up, when your job involves things that other people do on vacation. I would go to a dueling piano bar in Disney World and sit in the back and edit photos and write because it would help me stay awake if I was in this bar with these dueling pianos. So I wouldn't go back to my hotel and just be tempted to just crawl into bed.

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This is The Pulse. I'm Maiken Scott. We're talking about work-life balance. It may sound like a dream job to go to theme parks, try out all of the food, and get paid to write about it. But it's still work, and you can't slow down to enjoy the ride. Alan Yu has this profile. Alan Yu

When people ask AJ Wolfe what she does for work, she usually tells them she's a travel writer or she runs websites. Because what she actually does may not sound like work. I'm pretty sure that my mother-in-law still doesn't really think I have a job. AJ is an expert on the Disney theme parks. Unless you've traveled to Disney World and you sort of understand Disney,

She fell in love with Disney World as a kid. Her parents took her there every few years. When she was in college in the 1990s, she kept visiting the park with friends all on her own.

In the early 2000s, she was in New York and met her now husband who lived and worked in Dallas. He was a software developer and she worked for a small foundation. They started some websites together as a shared long-distance hobby. Then AJ moved to Dallas. In

In 2009, one of their website's Disney food blog got really popular. Disney didn't publish their menus for their restaurants. They didn't show pictures of the food. You had no idea what you were in for. You had no idea what you were getting when you went. And even though you were going to spend thousands of dollars on it.

At first, the content on the site was just AJ going to Disney World once or twice a month and trying lots and lots of food. I would probably go to five or six or even seven restaurants a day. I would eat multiple meals and order as much as I could when I was there in order to almost create a full meal.

Kind of like Pokemon, like collecting them all, like making sure you had pictures of every food item you possibly could at Disney World. This was in 2009, so there was no Instagram and no established culture of influencers taking pictures of food with smartphones to share with followers.

AJ carried a big digital camera around, taking pictures of a gigantic spread of food that was clearly not something she could eat by herself in one meal. I got a lot of kind of dirty looks from people, people not understanding what I was doing, thinking I was being real weird, which I was. And definitely got comments from servers like, are you sure you want that much food? That's a lot of food.

Beyond the looks and comments, AJ's quest to create comprehensive coverage about Disney's food was a lot of work.

Disney World has sit-down restaurants, fast food restaurants, stands for snacks like popcorn and churros and ice cream in various flavors. AJ would be in the parks from 8 a.m. to 11 p.m. I would go to a dueling piano bar in Disney World and sit in the back and edit photos and write because it would help me stay awake if I was in this place.

bar with these dueling pianos so I wouldn't go back to my hotel and just be tempted to just crawl into bed. When she was not in the parks, she wrote guides and planned future trips. And the site kept growing from a few posts a week about food to now 20 posts a day, created by a whole team.

They still review food, but they also write guides to visiting the various Disney parks. They cover Disney news and make videos. Their YouTube channel has more than a million subscribers.

Hey everyone, this is AJ Wolfe and I'd like to welcome you to the DFB channel where we focus on bringing you everything edible in Disney's parks, resorts and cruise ships. AJ says it is the best job, but it is still a job. And the work never really stops, not even during otherwise important and busy times, like when her son was born 11 years ago. I was in the hospital.

I had just had him the day before and Disney World dropped the Epcot Food and Wine Festival menus. And I was still in a situation where I was working primarily on my own. And so I had to get my computer and get that stuff up. And the nurses came in and they were like, what are you doing? And I was like, well, I've got to, you know, I've got to work. The Epcot Food and Wine Festival menus dropped and my readers need to know about it. And they're like, what?

no, like stop. You just had a baby. And I was like, no, you don't understand. I have to get this out.

She says things get extra hectic whenever a new area of the park opens up, like when Disneyland opened Star Wars Galaxy's Edge in 2019. Okay, everybody, we have been to Black Spire Outpost. We have been to Galaxy's Edge. We've got some great tips, things you need to know before you go. I think I probably slept maybe an hour in like two days. I would set my alarm for 12-minute naps just so that I could keep going.

There are things like that that are urgent in the moment. You got to cover all of it as quickly as you possibly can. AJ and her husband manage a team of about 50 people, including writers who live in Florida and California, who can cover the parks more closely.

Everybody works remotely. AJ tells her employees that when it comes to their work-life balance, working for their team is like working for a news organization. If it's, you know, the middle of the day on a Wednesday and nothing's really going on, we have people in the parks covering stuff, but there's no big news dropping or anything, those are fine times to do your laundry or go grocery shopping or whatever. But, you know, making sure that you're setting...

your boundaries the way that you need to, but we can't always promise that those boundaries can be nights and weekends. Things can happen at the Disney parks during odd hours, like a large animatronic dragon catching on fire during a nighttime show.

AJ says there have often been moments when she felt like this is all too much. But so far, she has decided to push through the difficult times. And she does still go to the parks for fun. It's absolutely still as much fun as it always was. I still have a blast.

And it's even more fun knowing that I don't have to work, that I can sort of shut off and not really care necessarily what's happening around me and instead just enjoy my family or my friends or whoever I'm there with. So I think I enjoy it even more than I used to because I'm able to sort of shut off and not have to consume everything that I'm seeing and process it. That story was reported by Alan Yu.

That's our show for this week. The Pulse is a production of WHYY in Philadelphia, made possible with support from our founding sponsor, the Sutherland Family and the Commonwealth Fund. You can follow us wherever you get your podcasts. Our health and science reporters are Alan Yu and Liz Tong. Our intern is Christina Brown.

Charlie Kyer is our engineer. Our producers are Nicole Curry and Lindsay Lazarski. I'm Maiken Skad. Thank you for listening.

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