Maha, I’ve been thinking about overwork so much this semester…I’m on sabbatical but because I am both admin and faculty, the sabbatical means I am not teaching but there’s no break in my admin role. And I agreed to be part of president’s strategic planning task force because it’s important…but I keep thinking there’s no sabbatical from the feeling of being overworked and under-rested. I do have more time than in a typical semester to help with my children’s homework (make sure they have good snacks, a well-lit space to work, etc.). And though my son and daughter are older than your daughter (9 and 13), I find the homework agony doesn’t improve as they get older (though I don’t have experience negotiating homework for a preschool or pre-kindergarten age child to compare to. “Play is the work of childhood,” writes Vivian Paley, and is a line I’ve often repeated to school administrators and teachers who claim that most parents think their kids don’t have *enough* homework…I have not met these parents 🙂 On the one hand, the hours they have to spend each day after a full day of school on homework allow me to work on the things that don’t get done while on campus (because meetings), on the other I see clearly that all of us are overloaded with unnecessary amounts of work that probably do not contribute to our cognitive, academic, or emotional well-being. I worry about modeling for them how to weave a balance between work and play and most times realize that what I’m modeling is the struggle of working towards anything like “balance.” In the last few weeks, I’ve been sharing this talk with the people I love and care about at work and who I know care about the well-being of our students, and each other. I’m linking to the interactive transcript here: http://bit.ly/1G0Ww2M and you can track back to the video. Maybe it doesn’t relate at all to your local context, but I am finding it a helpful analysis for understanding the current higher education system in which I work–and work culture more broadly in the US. Systems that breed competitiveness generate huge amounts of aggression, dysfunction, and waste–which is *counter*productive. Social connectedness, it turns out, is the key to productive work cultures. And helpfulness. The speaker, Margaret Heffenan, also has a recent piece in the Financial Times here https://www.ft.com/content/b4ae605a-99ce-11e6-8f9b-70e3cabccfae but I acknowledge that I could open it once as a link from Twitter and after that it was behind a paywall. She writes: “it is very hard for most people to accept that thinking is a physical activity, performed by the brain — which, like every organ, has limits to its capacity. We can see machinery break down, we notice broken arms and legs. We do not see broken minds — until it is too late. A proliferation of supposed antidotes to overwork — mindfulness, resilience training — may promise some respite but few of these programmes are any kind of a cure. Designed to increase endurance, they perpetuate the problem. We know machines have limits; we like to imagine that we do not.”