Reply to Fed parents: Is your worklife balance better or worse than mine?

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[quote=Anonymous]I have been in my current position for several years and could use your perspective. I’m a federal employee in a policy position. The workload, frankly, has been overwhelming from day one. I have perhaps 55 hours worth of work per week that I must attempt to cram into a 40-45 hour work week. I hit the ground running every morning, often skip lunch, and still see my cumulative work pile grow every week. This is highly stressful, and I still come out looking like I’m lazy or am not working hard enough. What’s worse is that my office often handles very sensitive issues. I’m forced to rush through concerns that should be dealt with in a thoughtful way. Not a good feeling, and stressful in its own way. My boss, with whom I work closely, is brilliant but disorganized. I rely on him heavily for his knowledge and expertise, but the disorganization makes it exhausting to work with him. Anyway, after experiencing all of the above on a daily basis, there’s not a lot of energy left to be a good spouse and parent when I get home from work. So my family is negatively impacted too.

On the other hand, this job has flexibilities and features that may not be easily matched in other federal jobs – (and I would prefer to stay in the federal sector). Key among them is that my boss allows me to work from home twice a week. This is an unbelievable godsend. It allows me to shorten my kids’ time in daycare/aftercare twice a week, and is great for scheduling service calls and such. On the days that I work on site, my boss also gives me flexibility in my arrival time. As long as I stay for an entire work day, he doesn’t care whether I start earlier or later than my official start time. This, too, has been awesome, given the daily bumps and scrapes of having a young family. No travel expectations in this job, which I also appreciate. Finally – while this job is not making me wealthy by any means – I anticipate that changing jobs would mean losing some salary. That wouldn’t be the end of the world, but I appreciate that my current salary allows me to save aggressively for college and overpay our mortgage.

Fed parents, is your worklife balance better or worse than mine? Should I suck it up and stay in the job that is stressful but flexible? Or are there fed jobs out there with a better overall worklife balance? 
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