A person that I follow on Twitter recently posted, “The successful person takes advantage of time all the time; the unsuccessful person laments in the lack of it.” We are all given the same amount of time each day, yet some people seem to take full advantage of it and others seem to squander it. In it all, the best way to be successful, in my opinion, is to have good time management skills that allow you to build balance in your life.
Balance is one of those things that is hard to define, but its presence or absence is readily recognized. To give our lives the best quality we can gain from it, we need to properly balance our employment life, our family life, our body’s well being, our social/community life, our educational life and our spiritual life.
Balance can be knocked out of kilter by one main culprit – ourselves. In all that goes on at work, home, and other places, there is little that you can directly control, other than yourself. A good way to help keep balance is to analyze a situation and determine if you have any control over it. If you do have control over it, assume the control that you have. If you do not have control over the situation, all you can control at that point is your reaction to the situation. The wrong reaction to a situation out of your control can be a great thief of your time. So many times, things that send our days spiraling out of control are things that we cannot control and our poor reaction to those situations. Keep perspective on what is going on and realize that there will usually be many more things that you cannot change than things you can change.
Planning tools can be utilized to assist with bringing balance and margin to your life. Referencing the earlier quote about time, calendars can do much to handcuff you or they can be successfully utilized to give you more balance. Try merging your work, family life, and other activities into the same calendar. By putting all of these things on the same calendar, it assists you in seeing where/when things can start to get out of balance. If you have too many meetings for work after hours, you are spending valuable time that could be utilized in other parts of your life and placing things out of balance. After work meetings are often a required and essential part of someone’s job, but if you have input into their planning, set priorities and spread them out over a series of weeks instead of taking the balance out of your schedule. If you cannot avoid having many meetings after hours, evaluate catching up on other needed parts of your life on the weekends and in time following the many meetings. If your work is taking up too much of your time and sending things out of balance, determine if the results of what you will gain from employment are worth the sacrifices that you are making in other parts of your life.
Proper perspective can assist you in getting better balance in your life. In each person’s life, there are usually good and bad things that occur over the course of time. Often, due to the nature of life, we can feel that the negatives outweigh the positives. When things are going well, we can even get the feeling that something must be wrong or bad things are on the horizon, due to our human nature. Focus on the good things in the day or in your past to help you through the tough times. Employment is a blessing, having a family is a blessing, just living in this country is also a blessing. Focus on the flowers amongst the weeds. If you focus on the negative, your perspective will become negative and it will throw you out of balance and will filter into all areas of your life.
Set goals in each area of your life. Define what you would like to do or what you would like to achieve in each area of your life. Look at what you are doing each day to help you achieve the goals or what you are doing to keep you from reaching those goals. When you achieve the goals, store them in your memory to help you through bad times. Also, when you achieve the goals, set yourself new goals in each area and continue to grow.
Finally, realize that you are not in this boat, rowing solo. We all have the same hours each day. Within our sphere of influence and world we contact each day, we all can face the same problems and be challenged by not having enough balance in our lives. Seek people and groups that can assist you in achieving balance. Realize that many people in our immediate world are often dealing with the same things we deal with each day. Share with others the struggles you have and allow them to entrust you with their tough times. I have the personal belief that our struggles we survive in our lives can be utilized to help others who are going through the same or similar circumstances. Sharing these things will allow you to realize that others are not really that different than you and you both can help each other be accountable in keeping a healthy balance in your life.