Is Work-Life Balance Achievable?

Sarah is a successful woman in her late 30's. She has a great business, great family and makes a fortune. She is the typical busy woman you'd think of. A normal day for her is shuffling through meetings, making lots of calls, managing staff, and making sure her business goes well. After a busy day, she goes home stressed out, burned out with some leftover work she needs to complete before the next day.

As successful as Sarah might look, she is dissatisfied with work and life in general and always looking for a way to create that balance to become that superhero at work and home. But guess what? She never gets to create that balance.

As tragic as this story might seem, Sarah is in all of us. We work our ass off, come back home tired, and unable to do the necessary things. We often skip important family stuff for work and sometimes forget important work stuff for family. It goes on like that, and we never find a balance because there is no balance in the first place.

When we think of WORK-LIFE BALANCE, we think of "WORK" and "LIFE" as two separate things we need to balance. However, life at work and life outside work are not separate things; they are intertwined. Think of it this way, whatever happens at work affects what happens outside work, and whatever happens outside work affects what happens at work.

Instead of creating a work-life balance that isn't achievable, you can set BOUNDARIES AND PRIORITIZE

Not setting boundaries and prioritizing what is important can cause a lot of stress. Study shows that people tend to spend so much time on what is urgent and not enough time on what is important. An essential step to prioritizing and setting boundaries is understanding what is important versus what is urgent. Important things often require your full attention and time; once you don't cater to important things and let it linger, they become difficult to fix, which will cause stress.

I was once like you, trying to find a balance, trying to prioritize and set boundaries. But it never worked because I didn't understand how to separate importance from urgency.

I learned a simple tip for separating importance and urgency, and I'm going to share it with you today. Before I go on, I want to ask you a few questions:

• Going to the store to get some clothes is urgent, but is it important?
• Replying DM's on social media is urgent, but is it important?
• Quality time with family is important, but is it urgent?
• Writing that article that will be published next week is important, but is it urgent?

Do you now understand a bit about urgency and importance? 

Importance always prevail over urgency. However, we often pick urgency over importance because it seems like if you don't do those urgent things, the world will end, which it isn't.

When you are with your family and your phone buzzes, we go straight to check the message because it seems urgent.

When you are in the middle of work and a notification on social media pops up, we go straight to check because it seems urgent.

It is easy to see how urgent things keep us from doing the important things.

The big question is, how can you do the important things and stick to it?

• Ignore Urgency

Can you go over your to-do list for today and remove all urgent things and replace them with essential things. If you have a vital project that needs to be done in three days and a trivial thing that needs to be done today, ignore that unimportant one and go with the critical task. You can always take care of the unimportant one later after you're done with the important one.

• Don't do anything out of panic.

Before doing something out of panic, ask yourself, "is it worth my time?" the answer is certainly NO. A sense of panic is often a sign you are placing so much importance on urgency. When I am looking for the best dress for a seminar and don't get it, I start to panic and overthink everything. But when I think of it deeply, it isn't that serious. 

The important thing is to be at the seminar, wear something nice and do what I have to do. Looking at things from that angle has helped me a lot at work and at home.

• Reduce the time you spend on urgent things

If you've been spending two-three hours on trivial things, reduce it to an hour. If you waste time on urgent things, you're calling for stress because you won't have time for essential things. 

But what about things that are both important and urgent?

When you have tasks that are both important and urgent, then PRIORITY comes into play. For instance, you have an important meeting with your boss in an hour, and your daughter suddenly collapses, and you have to take her to the hospital. They are both important things with urgency, but what do you do? You take your daughter to the hospital because she is more of a priority. You can always call your boss to reschedule.  

Let's also say you're trying to save some money for your son's birthday coming up next week, and you saw a "50% discount sale" on a shirt you've wanted to buy, and that sale only lasts for 24 hours, what do you do? 

I know you might say "it's obvious I'll wait till after my son's birthday cause of priority." But, it's not about priority; the sale is not essential, just urgent. If you choose the sales over your son's birthday, you will end up disappointing your son, and the shirt won't matter. 

Every time you choose urgency over importance, you are causing more stress for yourself. Learning the act of setting boundaries and prioritizing importance over urgency will go a long way to helping you manage your work-life situation.

I hope you've learned one or two things on how to set priorities and live a happy, stress-free life??