You have to put your partner and family at the top of the list and there must be downtime - time for gardening... — Shirley Ballas

You have to put your partner and family at the top of the list and there must be downtime - time for gardening, cooking time, book reading time.

Author: Shirley Ballas

Insight: The tricky part about this advice is that it sounds simple until you actually try it. Most of us know, intellectually, that people matter more than productivity. But when you're juggling work deadlines, emails, responsibilities, it's weirdly easy to treat your partner or kids like a task to check off rather than the thing that actually makes life worth living. Ballas is saying something almost radical: that the ordinary stuff—sitting down to read, making dinner without rushing, getting dirt under your fingernails in a garden—isn't a luxury you earn after you've been productive enough. It's foundational. What catches most people is the specificity. She's not saying "spend time with family" in vague terms. She's naming gardening, cooking, reading—activities that have rhythm and require your actual attention. They're the opposite of multitasking. When you're reading a book, your phone can't also be working. When you're gardening, you can't be answering Slack messages. These aren't just nice things; they're the mechanisms that actually protect your relationships from becoming hollow. The harder truth underneath is that saying yes to downtime means saying no to something else. That's why most people don't do it. But Ballas is suggesting that the "no" you're avoiding is actually costing you more than the productivity you're protecting.