Rhythm Over Balance
Welcome to The Brief by Global Edvocate. Twice a month, I share insights at the intersection of global education, law and policy, and innovation.
We talk about work–life balance as if it's a destination, something that can be reached. The problem is that international education doesn't move in straight lines.
Our work is global, unpredictable, and constant. Student intakes, visa cycles, government announcements, partner negotiations, and cultural calendars overlap with no real off-season. When the sun goes down on me, my colleagues across the world are waking up. I join meetings close to midnight to be able to talk with schools 14 hours ahead. I wake up to emails written over the course of an entire workday while I was sleeping. While many offices in higher education settle into the rhythm of the academic year, international offices live in perpetual motion, juggling multiple time zones, varying academic calendars, new regulations, and crises that do not care what month it is.
Balance, in our world, is a myth. Rhythm is survival. Rhythm is how we preserve humanity in a system that demands speed, empathy, and precision all at once. It is what keeps global work sustainable when everything around it moves faster than the humans doing it.
Why Balance Fails Us
"Balance" is seductive because it sounds orderly. It suggests a life where everything holds equal weight, a perfect distribution of attention between work and rest, family and ambition, urgency and calm. In international education, that equilibrium rarely exists. There is always an application deadline in a different hemisphere, a student in distress after hours, another policy update that rewrites the rules. Just when you start to exhale, someone calls about a visa delay or a lost passport. The work itself defies symmetry. For a competitive person bad at racquet sports, no amount of HR-encouraged pickleball is going to destress my workday in the name of work-life balance either.
Balance tells us that extremes are failures. Rhythm tells us they are essential. Rhythm recognizes what we already know intuitively: our energy ebbs and flows with the demands of the world. The busiest seasons are predictable only in their unpredictability. Recruitment surges at the beginning of the semester, orientation hits after deadlines pass and dust settles, crisis management happens every waking (and non-waking) minute. Even within those patterns, there is volatility. A policy change in Washington, a conflict where you are about to send students, or an outbreak somewhere in the world can alter your week instantly. Other offices may count time in semesters; we count it in visa windows, government announcements, flights, and student crises.
Athletes know that recovery is part of performance. Musicians know that silence gives music shape. The same principle applies here. Without rest between the surges, even the best teams lose their tempo. When we resist the natural rhythm of our work, we lose not just energy but perspective. Rhythm is what keeps the mission intact when the machinery gets loud.
What is Rhythm Anyway?
Rhythm isn't about controlling everything. That's the balance trap again. Rhythm is about creating pockets of predictability so you can handle the chaos that inevitably breaks through. It's about knowing when to push and when to recover, when to be available and when to protect space for deeper work. It's about returning to your tempo after disruption rather than expecting to maintain it continuously. Musicians don't abandon a piece when they miss a note. They come back in. The measure continues. It is rhythm in practice, not perfection, but return.
In international education, this means designing some elements of your time with intention while accepting that others will always be reactive. It means building rituals that anchor you even when the day goes sideways. It means distinguishing between the steady pulse that sustains you and the improvisational moments that define our work.
I should acknowledge that having any control over your calendar is a privilege. If you're entry-level, if your director demands immediate responses, if your role is entirely crisis response, your autonomy looks different than mine. Even within constraints, you can often find small spaces to establish rhythm, a consistent morning routine, a protected hour once a week, a ritual of closure at the end of each day. The goal isn't to have control but enough predictability to stay grounded when everything else is in motion.
Designing Rhythm
This is where the calendar becomes the anchor, not the enemy. I suspect that many of us treat our calendars as defensive tools, a shield against the never-ending demands of others. We accept every meeting, fill every open slot, and call it commitment. But a calendar without intention is just chaos on repeat.
What matters is routine that makes us the best version of ourselves. For me, that means waking up between 5:30 and 6:30, which would absolutely shock my father, seeing as he had to wake up his children with The Doors' "The End" playing over the house intercom when we were in high school. These days, I love spending quiet time alone, having a couple espressos, reading the news, fumbling around on social media, and simply having uninterrupted time before the wheels fall off the day.
In international education, a clear calendar makes me nervous. I still can't stop myself from looking at that beautiful, open day and thinking, "I'll get so much done! All those emails I'll knock out from 8:00 to 11:00!" And that's when I jinx it. A clear calendar inevitably means complete derailment: a student crisis, a billing issue, a new federal announcement sowing chaos, or simply a line of people needing answers to questions they could have solved themselves with a bit of initiative.
So rhythm isn't about maintaining the perfect day. It's about returning to your tempo when disruption happens. When my 9:00 - 10:00 am contract submission time gets sidelined by a visa crisis, I move it to the next time I can reclaim an hour. When a week goes completely off the rails, I don't berate myself. I find the first available moment to restore the pattern. The discipline is in keeping routine when you can, and forgiving yourself when you cannot.
The practical mechanics look like this for me:
Blocking time on my calendar and labeling it by function. It can't just be a big block of unlabeled time. For example, when presented with larger blocks of time, my calendar might show that 9:00 - 10:00 is contract submission, 10:00 - 11:00 is email, 11:00 - 12:00 is reviewing last week's admission data. If I don't label the time increments, I risk getting completely distracted for 20 minutes going down a rabbit hole of which sneaker is cool this season, or what promotional item we should buy for our spring fair (not until February 2026, so not time-sensitive), or which new baby pygmy hippo we're watching now, or who is currently on Mt. Everest.
Creating "purpose work" blocks that reconnect me to the why behind the chaos. It might be mentoring a staff member, writing a partnership proposal, or simply reading something that renews perspective. How many magazines or articles are sent our way each day? Do we ever have time to read them and reflect? These blocks are my declaration of values.
Building rituals of beginning and ending. I open each semester with energy, but I've learned to pause and acknowledge its end. The simple act of naming the season, "We did it!", helps sustain momentum for the next intake or recruitment cycle. It's something I have to remind myself of as our outbound numbers keep growing while our staff remains the same.
I once heard the saying, "Show me your calendar and I will tell you your priorities." My mother's calendar, a new one hung on the back of the pantry door every January, is meticulously carried over with birthdays, anniversaries, and doctor's appointments. My calendar looks nothing like hers, and maybe mine should include more celebrations and fewer reactions. Each week is a study in improvisation. It still reveals priorities: students and scholars, compliance and crises, travel and trust. It also exposes what gets lost.
If your week is filled entirely with other people's emergencies, your leadership will start to mirror that panic. If your calendar has no space for reflection or creativity, you will eventually lose sight of why the work matters. A reactive calendar produces a reactive culture.
Systems To Support Rhythm
Rhythm is about tempo, but tempo requires infrastructure. You need ways to capture, organize, and reflect so that the inevitable chaos doesn't erase everything you've learned.
A few weeks ago, I found myself down yet another rabbit hole watching people explain their "journaling ecosystems," comparing notebooks like people compare cars: leather covers, inserts, stickers, rituals. It made me think about how everyone builds systems to make sense of chaos. In our work, reflection isn't decorative but how we stay clearheaded amid constant motion.
I've tried journaling, truly, but it rarely lasts more than a week or two. My daily journal would end up being so mundane: "X brought a homemade bundt cake to the office, but they have a cat, so I'm not eating that," or "Two students threw a bottle off a hotel balcony in Berlin, and I spent the day apologizing to the partner institution." Not exactly poetic inspiration, and I had already spent the day writing emails about said issue, so journal entries ended up being repetitive and unproductive.
Still, I love writing by hand. I have a Fabriano notebook that I use for outlines, reflections, and ideas. It's tactile and grounding, a small ritual that reminds me I'm human amid the screen fatigue. I blend analog and digital, mixing notebooks with Evernote, which keeps my notes searchable and synced across devices.
My system is simple:
Use one daily meeting notes paper notebook at a time, completely. I end up with new Moleskin-style notebooks from partners or conferences regularly, so I don't even have to buy them. I choose one, use it up, and date it for reference. I have never been able to use my Apple Pencil and iPad for note taking. It just isn't the same.
Keep a separate, "nicer" one for creative thinking.
Organize digital notes by theme in Evernote: "Staff Meetings," "Country Profiles," "Enrollment Data." Easily searchable too, in case I forget to move notes into the themed notebooks. Tasks are satisfying to check off. The AI transcribe tool means I can record staff meetings without anyone needing to take notes and everyone knows what we talked about.
Forgive myself when none of it goes to plan.
It's not elegant, but it creates infrastructure for rhythm. These micro-systems matter more than we admit. They build reliability in a world defined by unpredictability. They let me return to the tempo after disruption because I haven't lost track of where I was.
The Emotional Labor of Rhythm
None of this would matter if international education were not such an emotional profession. Sure, we manage programs, but we manage people at the most vulnerable and aspirational moments of their lives. We sit between systems and humans, translating both. We absorb fear and confusion, and we try to give back clarity and confidence. The emotional weight of this profession is not a flaw. All of that takes more than time. It takes heart.
Rhythm gives us a framework for sustaining that emotional labor. It is stewardship of empathy. It says: you can't carry every crisis, every student, every new regulation indefinitely. You have to exhale if you want to keep breathing.
Think of leadership in international education as conducting an orchestra. Not all instruments are in the same key or tempo. The leader's role is to keep harmony amid dissonance. If you rush, everyone scrambles. If you slow down deliberately, others learn that it's safe to breathe.
This matters for your team, too. If you establish rhythm for yourself but expect your team to remain perpetually reactive, you're creating exactly the kind of unsustainable culture that rhythm is meant to counter. Team rhythm looks different than individual rhythm, and it requires coordination.
In practice, this means protecting some predictable meeting times so people know when collaboration happens, establishing norms about response times so urgency doesn't become the default, creating shared rituals that mark transitions between busy seasons, and modeling recovery so your team knows it's not only acceptable but necessary to step back after intense periods.
If we lose rhythm, individually or collectively, we lose trust. Partners stop hearing from us, students stop feeling seen, and teams burn out. Rhythm is professional integrity.
Balance implies control. Rhythm accepts flow. When we stop expecting constancy, we stop punishing ourselves for living in motion. We stop comparing our behind-the-scenes chaos to someone else's curated calm. We start designing our time, and our teams' time, with the same intentionality we give to our partnerships and students.
I want to be clear that rhythm isn't a solution to structural problems. If your institution is chronically understaffed, if expectations are genuinely unrealistic, if leadership demands 24/7 availability without regard for sustainability, those are conditions that should be challenged, not merely coped with. Rhythm helps us survive and even thrive within complex work, but it doesn't excuse organizations from their responsibility to create humane conditions.
Still, even within imperfect systems, rhythm is what we can practice. Our calendars tell the story of our days. Rhythm, the way we pace, pause, and recover, tells the story of our lives.
The goal isn't to keep perfect time. Some of the best music is rubato, the tempo flexing and breathing with the emotion of the piece. The goal is to know when to slow the tempo, when to rest between movements, and when to bring the music back in. Leadership, especially in international education, isn't about staying on beat but conducting the score with grace, knowing when to hold the tempo and when to let it breathe.
I keep an open door most of the time, but during the “function work” times on my calendar, Spock comes out.