INFORMS Open Forum

Hi everyone! 

As we look for ways to support healthier work–life balance across our communities, I’m curious how OR/MS thinking shows up in your personal routines?

Many of you spend your days designing smarter systems and optimizing processes, and those same principles can be powerful when building sustainable habits, whether that’s carving out focused work blocks, setting clear boundaries, or reducing “bottlenecks” that make rest harder to prioritize.

What strategies have helped you create healthy, repeatable routines? Maybe you use small decision rules, minimize daily “setup time” for hobbies or exercise, or apply a simple heuristic to protect downtime.

Feel free to share any habit‑building approaches that have worked for you and might help others find a better balance!

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Garrett Johnston
Membership Engagement Coordinator
gjohnston@informs.org
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I actually thought in terms of goals and constraints before I took my first OR/MS course. It was satisfying to find out there was a name for the way I naturally thought when I took my first LP course as a junior at Purdue studying industrial engineering.

Since then I've continued to hone my thinking both on the work and personal side. I wrote a blog post last summer about automating your decisions. Having a decision policy (I run on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays) is a lot easier to follow through on. And we can also more easily predict what the future looks like after you've followed that policy (healthy) versus deciding each day if you'll run or not (One day doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things).

At some point I saw a post that commented about how work-life balance is a silly term (google provides many explanations as to why). But the value of ensuring you prioritize the right mix of goals and activities is both tricky, and important. And is something OR/MS thinking helps me navigate every day.

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Zohar Strinka CAP-Expert
Analytics Strategies LLC
Denver, CO
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OR/MS thinking is basically how my brain works, and it's what led me into the field. I'm very "J-leaning," so I plan daily/weekly/monthly routines intentionally: prioritize the true bottlenecks, batch similar tasks, and always leave buffer time so the plan doesn't collapse when real life happens. It's been one of the most helpful ways I've found to maintain balance.

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Haoran Cao
Rutgers University
Jersey City NJ
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