Stop Juggling and Start Sorting: Diana Haussling on the Balls You Can Afford to Drop
For years, we told women they could “do it all” and “have it all,” and that with enough grit and a good enough calendar, they could keep every ball in the air at once. Diana Haussling, CEO of Hello Products and a 2026 New York Women in Communications Matrix Honoree, would like to gently retire that idea.
“There’s this false notion that there’s a thing called work-life balance,” she told us on a recent episode of the WomenHeard podcast. “The reality is we have but so many hours in a day. In order to achieve our goals, we have to make choices. That means you’re going to fail in some areas and be awesome in others.”
The pressure to balance it all, she says, is really pressure on women to be superheroes “when sometimes we just need to sit, rest, recharge, and then move on to the next thing.”
So instead of balancing, Haussling “sorts.” Here’s how she frames it:
Which Balls Shatter and Which Ones Bounce?
Picture everything you’re carrying as a set of balls in the air. Some are made of glass, some are made of plastic. The glass balls are the things that, if you drop them, they’ll shatter; they’re too important to fail. The plastic balls are the ones that, if they fall, they’ll simply bounce back up.
Your health, for example, is a glass ball. “If you’re not healthy, if you’re not getting the rest you need, you’re going to be depleted, and you’re not going to show up as your best self,” Haussling says. Beyond that, only you can decide what belongs in the glass category: the relationships, commitments, and values you refuse to let crack.
The plastic balls are everything else, and naming them is where you’ll find freedom. Haussling points to a common one: the new manager who can’t stop micromanaging because she hasn’t yet learned to let her team try—and occasionally fail—on their own. “Give them a little room. Let them try something that’s not that critical,” Haussling suggests. “If they fail, it’s a learning opportunity. That’s basically a ball that bounced back up.” What looks like dropping the ball is often just delegating it.
The real skill, Haussling argues, is the rebound. “How quickly are you able to rebound? And have you armed your team with the tools to rebound quickly?”
Why Does This Frame End the Anxiety?
The genius of the glass-versus-plastic distinction is that it turns hard decisions into obvious ones. Once you know a ball is plastic, you stop pouring energy and worry into catching it every single time.
Haussling is candid that this matters even more in seasons when your baseline stress is higher. Speaking openly about being in perimenopause, she notes that anxiety levels naturally rise, and the framework becomes a kind of anchor: “It’s a good frame of reference that allows you to say, I’m going to put energy into the big things, and I’m not going to allow anxiety, pressure, and fear to take over those plastic balls.”
So much of the exhaustion women describe at work isn’t the work itself but the emotional tax of treating every task as though it were made of glass. Deciding—on purpose—that some things are allowed to bounce is not lowering your standards, but protecting the ones that actually matter.
How to Figure Out What Your Glass Balls Are
If you’re not sure which of your balls are which, Haussling offers a starting point: a career-mapping exercise.
You start at your very first role. For Haussling, that was riding her bike to take neighborhood kids to the swim club. Then trace the whole arc to today, noting at each stage what fueled you and what drained you.
“It gives you a transparent view of yourself,” she says. “It helps you weigh projects, and it helps you identify when your stress levels are going to be high.” In other words, it tells you where your glass balls have always been long before anyone handed you a title.
It’s a small action with an outsized payoff, which feels especially fitting given that this year’s Matrix Awards theme was “the butterfly effect,” or the idea that small choices ripple into lasting change. Deciding what you’ll protect and what you’ll let bounce is exactly that kind of small and quiet decision that reshapes not just a single week, but a whole career.
The Permission We’ve Been Waiting For
There’s something a little radical about Haussling’s reframe (although maybe it shouldn’t be!). It gives women permission to drop things intentionally. We can all now try to recognize that a dropped plastic ball is never a crisis, only a story we tell ourselves.
You don’t have to catch everything. You just have to know what’s glass.
Thank you to Diana Haussling for joining us! To hear more of the conversation, listen to the WomenHeard podcast.
