Amanda Goetz Doesn't Believe in Balance

If she were merely the head of brand marketing at the Knot, Amanda Goetz would have enough work to fill her days—and enough stress to guarantee plenty of sleepless nights.

But that’s not all Amanda Goetz does. She’s also getting a new startup off the ground, and homeschooling two of her three kids (“After this is phonics,” she tells me as we sit down). There’s also, like, a global pandemic going on.

I figured I would hear from Amanda that her life is all about “balance”: how to get it, how to keep it, how to hold one thing in each hand. But Amanda Goetz prefers to embrace it all. She doesn’t believe in balance.

She doesn’t expect her life to be separated into discrete parts of work and family and interiority. It’s one life, and trying to pretend things can be perfectly compartmentalized—especially when you’re working at home with kids because of a global pandemic—leads to more stress, more guilt, and less realistic expectations. She lets them blend, and lets everybody know.

She took my call during her “bopping around” hours in the middle of the day, when her kids sometimes sit in her lap while she’s in a meeting, or she emails while waiting for her daughter to finish an assignment, when everything blends, when they’re “in it together.”

We talked about how she sets expectations clearly: with her kids, with her colleagues, and with herself—and then makes sure she lives up to them. We also talked about how she makes sure to carve out focus time and alone time even in the middle of her busy blended days. And we covered the time and emotional management skills she’s developed over the years to sprint through her ambitious schedule.

So much of what Amanda told me sounded hard-earned, genuine, and simple—the way things kind of are when you’re talking to someone who takes no bullshit. But she’s probably wouldn’t call anything bullshit. Instead she says, “I don’t believe in that.”

Want to know what she does believe in? Let’s dive in!