Donna Novitsky of Big Tent says her motto is “Go Big or Don’t Go.” But she also offers some interesting advice for working people with families in the Stanford Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Seminar. (Click on this link to stream or download the one hour podcast, “From Venture Capitalist to Entrepreneur.”)
The moderator says she has a different worklife balance between her business and her career than most people he knows. Then, he asks her to explain to the students how she finds balance between her work and her family (which consists of a husband, two kids, and a cat).
Here’s Novitsky’s response:
Finding balance is probably one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do… When you have kids, everything changes. No longer is it solely your agenda, and they move at their own pace, and you need to adapt yourself to their pace. And so that’s just incredibly challenging because I’m used to being able to put in whatever hours it takes to get the A, whatever hours it takes to get another customer. Whatever hours. And now I can’t do that anymore.
One thing I discovered is that you’ve got to think of balance not in terms of a day or a week or maybe even a month. But balance takes place over a long period of time.
For instance, in 2006, I worked only a couple of days a week, spent a lot of time at home, got involved with the kids’ school, got them to make their beds when they go to school, got them to set the dinner table on a regular basis. Some little goals that I had for our family that take time and focus. Building that base allowed me to go at Big Tent, which is basically a 7 am to 7 pm role.
Between my husband and I, John now pretty much is home… So while I work really hard during the week, I also find some balance on the weekends, and I’m a dedicated world class soccer mom out there with the kids. You learn to juggle. You need to change the equation now and then, but who your life partner is is also a key part of that. And understanding yourself and your priorities is an important thing as you make those choices.
I don’t know Novitsky’s faith. But I think there is some real wisdom in this statement: Balance takes place over a long period of time.
Don’t try to balance your day. Don’t try to schedule your work and your relationships into a legalistic regimen of scheduled activities, duties, and obligations. No one needs another ten commandments of parenting.
After all, the law and the prophets come down to two commands. Love God. Love others. That’s it.
I love Monday mornings because now I can get to work. (Just like I love Monday evenings because then I get to be with my family.)
As long as it has taken us to get this blog network started, I could just as easily call this post “The Boy Who Cried Blog!” But you know, we wanted to get as many kinks worked out as possible.
On Friday, I spent an hour on the phone with one of my personal heroes, Parker Palmer. I was interviewing him for 
So, what’s the best conclusion I can draw from all of this? I need more data. More importantly, I know that more data will be useful because even this small experiment showed that it is very possible to harness the power of blogs in a simple grass roots way. With a little bit of careful instruction, I hope to plan future experiments to target the relative importance of specific variables.
The top five referring blogs sent us 64% of all the traffic from blogs. Although that’s a lot, our traffic flow was much more evenly distributed than the 80/20 rule you sometimes hear.
