Cultivate a personal life -- but remember where the lines are.

THE DAY JILL LABBE'S husband -- a cop -- was razzed at work over a column in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram in Texas, she learned something else about balancing the home/work seesaw.

Prior to that day, Labbe, the newspaper's senior editorial writer, thought she had mastered the balancing act by adhering to a pair of principles: Get out of the office. Allocate time to personal relationships.

Then came the column about her husband's hunting rituals, which include deploying scent covers made from film canisters and, um, a woman's personal-hygiene product.

Labbe thought the column would provide relief from the standard fare and resonate with the legions of Texas hunters. She figured her husband wouldn't mind being the topic of a piece unrelated to police work. Nevertheless, as a shrewd journalist/spouse, she wrote the column for publication while her husband was in the woods hunting, doing whatever hunters do with scent covers.

It turned out she didn't cover her tracks. Some of Texas's finest preserved the evidence, and Labbe's husband returned from hunting to a police station plastered with copies of the column and filled with snickers.

To broaden her perspective ("Balance," she said, "doesn't come from the people we're surrounded by on the editorial board") Labbe still hangs out at gun ranges and befriends alienated teen-agers. But, ever since that column, she has a limit to mixing the personal with the professional: "I can't write about my husband without his permission."

Moral of the story: Balancing the home/work seesaw means knowing when not to take your work home, and when not to take your home to work.

Setting limits on the workplace's intrusion into family life is crucial, said Chuck Stokes, who followed Labbe as a panelist during the NCEW professional workshop billed as "Get a life! ... But what do I do with it?"

Stokes, editorial/public affairs director at WXYZ-TV in Detroit, said he seldom refers to his family on the air. Just as important, Stokes said, he has embraced "family planning" - by coordinating his schedules with those of his wife and children on a master calendar.

"It's a balancing act for all of us," he said. "It has forced us to have constant conversations, and we plan the week on Sunday night. We try not to have bad weeks at the same time."

At least once a month, Stokes and his wife take their children out to dinner in a different section of Detroit. The outings are entertaining but they also help Stokes remain familiar with his broadcast area and expose his children to the city's ethnically diverse population.

Other suggestions from the panel and questioners: Prioritize. Use letters to the editor as a barometer for judging what "regular" folks are interested in. Be as creative in your personal life as you are professionally. Realize that some of life's most important responsibilities - such as listening to children when they want to talk - can't be scheduled and can only be fulfilled by being available and prepared to listen.

And, as Stokes said he discovered, understand that shows go on and presses roll without us.

NCEW member Thomas Lee Tryon is editorial page editor of the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. His e-mail address is [e-mail]