'tis the season for that old cliché – the one about work-life balance

As I sit on the couch this afternoon beside a snoring, stuffed-up but hopefully no longer feverish child, it strikes me that, more than any other time of year, this is when we are most aware of the need for flexibility between the two solitudes of work and home life.

My son's flu, while totally ordinary, has wiped out three half days each for my partner and me, led to several cancelled meetings, and will require a fair amount of evening drudgery to make up missed stuff. It's also put a crimp in our holiday prep, which when you have kids is not at all a secondary consideration; their Christmas morning deadline is far more inflexible than any client's.

Thankfully, the folks that run MacLaren are actual human beings and very reasonable; I also like to think this is my own style of dealing with the two solitudes. I can't imagine working in an environment that didn't support this approach to its people.

Which is fortunate because, as Susan Pinker in the Globe recently wrote, there is a real hard cost to being an asshole manager: a provable cost in employee cardiovascular health, let alone missed days, efficiency and happiness.

So I guess I was pretty bang-on with what I wrote back in June:

Maybe the stress of work-life imbalance is one of those contemporary afflictions that comes with life in the twenty-first century. On the other hand, giving someone flexibility, and the ability to call on that flexibility without worry for their jobs or professional status, seems to me to be a key way to alleviate some of that stress. I suppose you'd call it treating people like grown-ups.

When you're a parent, or someone dealing with an aging parent, or frankly pretty much anyone with responsibility outside the office, you have enough anxiety that you don't need your job adding to the mix. To quote myself again:

Family emergencies, school concerts, funerals; things that you would regret not attending should be attended without guilt.

Anyway, on that happy note, Merry Christmas to you.