When I started a new job as the director of a non-profit programme, one of the first orders of business was to read over a memo I’d been handed describing my new duties and responsibilities: it ran to three pages. Single-spaced.
In addition to my work as a journalist and author, I now had a host of other tasks to juggle — managing budgets, supervising staff, fundraising, developing and executing research projects, outreach and more. On most days, no matter how productive I had been, it felt like something always fell through the cracks. I didn’t sleep much.
It turns out that what I was experiencing is a phenomenon that researchers are only beginning to study: work-work conflict.