How to master the balancing act of life

All you want is a minute to yourself. Two would be nice. Is that too much to ask? Apparently so. You’re busy all the time. Whether you’re fulfilling obligations or putting out the inevitable daily fires, your time doesn’t feel like your own. So how can you balance the competing pressures of work, school, and loved ones and find time to yourself? Is this even possible?

The answer, my overworked, brow-wiping friends, is yes. To provide you with some how-to’s, we’ve gathered the insight and advice of three best-selling authors well-versed on the topic of life balance.

Plenty of work, but for what?

So many of us feel like we’re just spinning our wheels. It seems there’s more and more to do every day, and more technology to allow you to do it. But often, there’s less of a feeling of accomplishment—at least around the most important things in our lives.

“Even with time-saving devices, people generally don’t feel more efficient, they just feel busier,” says Rebecca Merrill, co-author with husband Roger Merrill of Life Matters, a book about how to create a dynamic balance between work, family, time and money, and co-author (with Roger and Stephen R. Covey) of First Things First, The New York Times bestseller about how to prioritize what’s important in your life.  “The feeling is just overwhelming for a lot of people,” she continues. “And in the absence of coming to grips with what really is important in their lives, they tend to get a sense of validation through busy-ness. They tend to think if they’re busy they must be valuable.”

But busy-ness is often an empty shell concealing a lack of meaning and purpose in life. If you don’t know what makes your life meaningful, and you don’t spend time doing those things, that’s when the constant, superficial activities seep in and fill up your time.

The mission to have a mission

Simply changing your daily habits isn’t enough to create balance. You have to restructure at a deeper level. Stephen R. Covey, bestselling author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, suggests first writing a personal or organizational mission statement. “There has to be an overall purpose or sense of what your values are,” he says. “A mission statement defines your purpose, your values and the vision you have for your life.”

Covey says your mission statement can be a sentence or two, or longer. The underlying purpose of it is to be of service. An example of a personal mission statement is as follows:

To create a balanced, healthy and value-driven life by creating nurturing relationships and guiding others to see their full potential through my work as a therapist.

Without a mission, you’ll find yourself making ad hoc decisions based on what seems to be high priority at the moment. “And you won’t have the power to say no,” says Covey, “so you’ll end up saying yes to everything and be caught in what I like to call ‘the thick of thin things.’ It’s when you’re active and busy, but not accomplishing anything of real significance.”

Covey also offers a powerful method for uncovering what really matters to you. He  suggests you write your eulogy, as you would like it to be, as if it were written by four different people in your life. He suggests these people are a member of your family, a friend, a coworker and someone from your community. “If you write the bullet points of what you would want these people to say about you, it will drive you to think seriously about what is most important. When you go through this process, you come to a clear sense of what is important to say yes to. And this gives you great courage to say no to that which is not important.”

And that’s the key — knowing when to say no. Look around you. Of all the people you know whose lives seem the most out of control, how many of them have trouble saying no and setting boundaries? Once you discover your values and what truly makes you happy, your life becomes inner-directed. And only then do you start to get your balance back.

Like sands through the hourglass, so are the roles of our lives

Once you’ve written your mission statement, next write out the many roles, or aspects, of your life. For instance, you might write down “father, graphic designer, community service, health, friends.”. “Then you come up with a goal for each of those roles that you’d like to accomplish this week,” explains Covey, “and schedule it into your calendar.” This enables you to actively work on all the areas of your life on a weekly basis, instead of overfocusing on just one or two of them.

“I believe in long-term planning,” says Covey. “If it’s a long-term goal, like a six month or longer one, you can start scheduling one thing per week that will move you closer to it.” Like Covey, Brian Tracy, one of the world’s top business speakers and author of 35 books, is a strong believer in the importance of having clarity about long-term goals. “Long-term goals are what keep you balanced and moving forward. Long-term intent sharpens and improves short-term decision making. We have found that people with long-term perspective are far more effective and efficient in the short term because they are very clear about where they’re going.”

“Things will always come up that cause you to make adaptations,” Covey adds, “but at least you’ll be thinking long term. And you’ll be thinking in terms of being a balanced person instead of just being consumed by one role.” Which gives you the ability to say no to the lower priority tasks in your life. “Only when someone has a burning yes inside themselves about what is more important will they have the moral courage to say no to that which is popular and urgent but not important.”

People as the core

Some feel that being balanced requires spending most of your time doing things you don’t want to do, like work and chores. As if somehow — if we could just keep up with that endless list of unappealing “shoulds” — we would finally be balanced. But many people focus on the unappealing tasks more than the appealing, and still necessary, ones, such as spending time with family and friends, taking time to relax, and so on. Certainly the less appealing tasks must be attended to, but make sure you don’t give them more weight than tasks that make you happy.

To attain life balance, Tracy says you need to first set your own happiness at the center of your life. “Organize your life around what makes you happy: your work, your home, your relationships, whatever it might be.” If you compromise your own happiness, he adds, you’ll get out of control and out of balance. “People make every kind of reason or excuse to do what they think others want them to do, what they feel they have to do, and so on. But nothing will cause you more pressure or imbalance than that.”

“Eighty-five percent of all your happiness will come from your relationships with other people,” estimates Tracy. “People are not peripheral to life, they’re central to life.” He believes the purpose of time management is to have more time in your personal life without feeling stressed out by the work you haven’t done yet. “Sometimes people think the purpose of time management is so you can spend more time at work doing more things. No! The purpose of time management is to get on top of your work and feel completely at ease so you can spend time with your family without feelings of pressure.”

All the experts agree that the stress of imbalance arises when your external life is out of alignment with your internal values. To determine these values, Tracy suggests imagining you only have six months to live. How would you change your life? “The answer to this question always revolves around people,” he says. “And that’s how you begin to get your life in balance: You begin putting people in the center of your life.”

So what really floats your boat?

Once you’ve figured out your values, it’s time to determine in more detail just what makes you happiest. Tracy says one of the best ways to do this is to imagine that you are already financially independent. “If you could do anything you want, without limitation, how would you design your life so you would be the very happiest?” You’re imagining and visualizing your perfect life. What would you be doing? How would you organize your time? How would you live each day, each week, and each month in terms of work, your family life and your health?

“Always start with a vision of the ideal,” says Tracy. “Then go back to the present and ask, ‘What step can I take right now to start making my current life more like my ideal life?’ ” It’s quite straightforward from there: You take the first action. “You don’t try to change the whole world at once,” he warns. “You just take one step in the direction of a clear, exciting vision of your ideal life.”

Just do it

Often we aren’t balanced because until we really think about it — write out our values, and see what actions we can take (or stop taking) to make positive changes — we aren’t able to see how much control we really have over our lives. On the other hand, we often do know what we need to do — like spend more quality time with our family, for instance — but we still don’t do it. Well, I hate to break it to you: There’s no easy way out of this trap. But there is an escape, and it involves using good, old-fashioned (and unpopular) self-discipline.

“Self-discipline is the beginning and end of all success,” says Tracy. You have to simply start doing what you know you need to do, and stop pushing it off for later. When you finally start doing these things, you start feeling better about yourself. That guilt that constantly dogged you, that came from knowing you’re not doing what you really want to do, starts to dissipate. You start to see positive changes in your life. And eventually those results become your motivation, and the self-discipline aspect isn’t such a struggle anymore. The desire for the payoff becomes greater than your resistance.

“It’s easier to discipline yourself if you plan, organize, and break your tasks down into small steps and then just take the first step,” offers Tracy. “Soon that becomes a habit. Successful people are those who have good habits.  Ninety-five percent of what you do or don’t do in life will be determined by your habits. If you have good work habits you will be successful. If you don’t, you’ll always have to work for someone else who will supervise you.”

To exercise the self-discipline muscle, Covey suggests first making commitments to follow through on smaller tasks. “By making and keeping a small promise, eventually your sense of personal honor will become greater than your moods, and you won’t be a product of your circumstances anymore. You’ll be a product of your own decisions, not your conditions.” 

As with our personal lives, so it is with business

“Typically, only a small percentage of people in an organization really know what the highest priorities of the organization are and are clearly focused on its top goals,” shares Roger Merrill, corporate consultant and co-author of Life Matters and First Things First. “So what happens is that people feel the pressure to accomplish things but they’re not sure what those things are, so they focus on rushing around and making everything seem urgent and important. Urgency becomes the counterfeit of what’s really important, so to speak.”

From his experience as a consultant, he says he can roughly measure — without even doing a survey — the degree of uncertainty people have about an organization’s real priorities. His measurements are based on how much people seem to be running around the office convincing themselves of how pressured they are and how urgent everything is.

“They key,” he says, “is to have a few things to focus on that are supremely important. Then you’re less panicked about everything because you know what you need to concentrate on. If you can always keep the bigger picture in front of you, you make decisions that are wise. You’re not always responding to circumstances or emotions or other people’s expectations.”

“But it’s not up to me!”

Covey has observed a direct correlation between life imbalance and victimization. “Some people are so reactive they don’t have any sense of being in control of their lives at all. They essentially become a victim to their circumstances,” he says. “Victims are not making choices, their lives are just being lived. All they’re doing is giving their futures away, and sometimes even empowering the weaknesses of other people.”

We all have freedom to choose, we just don’t always see our choices — or refuse to own  them. “It’s scary to realize [you have choices] because it makes you responsible. It’s easier to say ‘I can’t do this because I have to do that instead,’ ” says Covey. “There’s always a space between anything that happens to us and our response to it. And the more you develop a mission statement based on values, the wiser your responses become.”

You can’t change many situations and circumstances in life, but you can change the way you look at and react to them. “We have the power to reinvent ourselves and lift ourselves to entirely new levels if we make our minds up to do so,” says Covey. “We’re not a product of how other people treat us or of our past. We’re a product of our chosen responses to all of those things. We always have power over our own attitudinal response to circumstances over which we have no control.”

Procrastination

Don’t feel bad. We all do it. It’s part of being human. Then what is the difference between high performers and low performers? Tracy has an answer: “High performers procrastinate on low-value tasks and low performers procrastinate on high-value tasks.” The difference is conscious versus unconscious procrastination. With conscious procrastination, you consciously decide what you’re going to procrastinate on. With unconscious procrastination, you unconsciously end up procrastinating on the most important things.

“Never give into the temptation to clear up small things first,” warns Tracy. “Because small things are like rabbits in the summer — they multiply. If you start with small things, you’ll still have a long list of small things to do, and your big tasks will still be sitting there, untouched. You get back into balance by starting and completing your most important tasks first, and you get out of balance by spending too much time on low value tasks.”

Often we procrastinate when we’re not sure which task we’re supposed to be doing at a given time. A good way to prevent that scenario is to plan how you will spend your time — in, the next a week, let’s say — in advance. “The rule is that every minute spent in planning saves 10 minutes in execution,” says Tracy. “So your pay off is 1,000%. There’s nothing that will pay you back more than simply disciplining yourself to plan before you start.” But he also warns that once you complete your plan, act immediately. Over-planning is a very popular activity people use to — you guessed it — procrastinate.

Family focus

“When you are with your family,” starts Tracy, “be there 100% of the time. And that means being head to head and knee to knee.” Physical presence is not the same thing as emotional presence, and it’s surprising how many people know this but still absorb themselves in other activities while with their families. “The only type of personal time that counts is face to face time. Or, if you’re traveling, ear to ear time. Nothing else counts, not reading the newspaper, talking on phone, or watching TV.”

Rebecca Merrill offers a simple but effective method for improving family relationships. The first step is to identify everyday behaviors you do that have negative results, including little things like not putting the toilet seat down or leaving crumbs in bed. Then make a list of the things that have positive results, such as saying “thank you,” doing something special to surprise someone, or really listening. “One of the best ways to increase the happiness in your family is to simply stop doing the negative things and start doing the positive things,” she says. “The reason is because in relationships, the ‘little’ things are the big things. They communicate genuine caring and concern.” This sounds basic, but it requires a strong degree of commitment over a long period of time. And to maintain that commitment, you have to decide beforehand to make family a priority in your life.

Optimizing work time

If you want to maximize your productivity at work and balance it into the larger scheme of your life, focus is crucial. “When you work, work all the time you’re working,” says Tracy. “The reason people’s lives get out of balance is not because they have too much work to do, it’s because they do too little work.” In other words, we’re wasting time!

“The average person working a 40 hour week is actually working about 32 hours,” continues Tracy. “Fully 50% of working time today, on average, is wasted.” But the work doesn’t go away, so we drag it home or feel frantic or overwhelmed. “When you go to work, realize this is not play time. This is not an adult sandbox. This is work,” says Tracy. “If you focus, you will double your productivity. You’ll feel a tremendous sense of release. And when you end the day you’ll feel energized and be caught up with everything. And suddenly your life will be back in balance.”

The Merrills and Covey suggest being proactive at work. This means taking charge of your workload and direction, instead of simply waiting each day to see what is dropped into your in box. “Ask yourself,” says Rebecca Merrill, ” ‘Of all the things I’m concerned about, which ones can I actually do something about?’ Then focus your efforts on doing those things effectively, and let go of the rest.”

“It sounds so simple,” she says, “but what happens is, most people have a lot of things they are bugged about or upset about, but when they get right down to it, they can’t personally, at this point in time, do anything about them. So the effective worker says, ‘I’ll let go of those things I can’t do anything about right now, and focus on those things I can something about.’ “

What this does is empower us and remind us that we have choices and the ability to influence our circumstances. “When you work on the things you can do something about, your influence and capacity grow,” says Merrill. “But when you spend all your energy focusing on all the things you can’t do something about, there’s less you can do, and other people don’t give you credibility or as many opportunities.” Ask yourself how much of your thought, time and language are spent focused on blaming or accusing, or on things you really have no control over. “Listen to your language,” says Merrill. “If you say things like ‘if only’, ‘they’, ‘them’, and if you think the problem is out there, that’s usually the problem.”

A little money tip

One of the easier and most effective ways to begin getting your finances under control is to track them. Yeah, you’ve heard it before, but have you actually tried it for more than a few days? How serious are you about changing your money habits? According to Roger and Rebecca Merrill, the main motivation for tracking your finances should initially be to see if your spending habits reflect your values.

“Some people may say it’s important to make financial goals before tracking their finances,” says Roger Merrill, “but I think, for a lot of us, if we just look at it where our money’s going, sometimes it’s enough of a shock to simply realize we’re not anywhere near where we want to be.” After you track your finances for a month or two, see if your spending habits reflect your values and goals. Often we know it isn’t a smart financial decision to buy a cappuccino and muffin every day, but until we see how much money it eats up a month, we aren’t as motivated to cut down on this expense. By prioritizing your values and keeping your most important goals in the forefront of your mind, it becomes easier to change self-defeating spending habits.

And the final objective is…

What you should aim for when seeking balance is peace of mind. It’s about actively managing the various parts of your life in a way that works as a whole.  It’s not — as Tracy pointed out earlier — about figuring out how to spend more time doing work. “If you don’t find balance in your life,” says Covey, “you’ll lack peace of mind and integrity. People who lead unbalanced, unprioritized lives will often find themselves making bad judgements and poor decisions. For instance, if you don’t make health a priority, it will become a priority because you’ve lost it. And the same goes with family.”

“It doesn’t matter where you’re coming from,” says Tracy. “All that really matters is where you’re going. You need the courage to stand back and look at your life and realize that you’re not perfect — that you’ve made a lot of decisions in the past and many of them didn’t turn out the way you expected. Are you going to have the honesty and courage to say, in retrospect, it was not a good decision, but now I’m going to change it?”

Because what it comes down to is this: If you’re not willing to seize that courage, you won’t move forward in life. And whether you stay stuck or move forward is always your decision.

How are you going to choose?