You have to know yourself and what is important to you in your life, if you want to achieve work and life balance.Once you know what is important, you manage your time according to that. Work and life balance comes down to

• Knowing, understanding, and living your values
• Having and following life goals
• Knowing how to manage your time and doing it to achieve your goals

 

Your Values and Achieving Work and Life Balance

Values can be simply defined as what is important to you. It is a very personal thing. Each of us rank our values based upon the importance we give to each value. The seniority we give to our values has an impact on the decisions we make.

People will some idea of their values, but will not be cognizant of the ranking they give to them I occasionally run into people who have done courses that have help them to develop their values hierarchy. You have to understand your hierarchy of values if you want to balance your work and life.

In my work as a coach, I got into trouble a few times by assuming that I knew the values of the person I was working with. What follows is a case in point. I was coaching an executive director of a blue chip multinational company.

1. He was working 90 hours per week
2. He worked from 5AM til 8PM Monday through Friday
3. He worked an additional 15 hours every weekend
4. He hadn’t taken a vacation in the last year

 

My work with him was about helping him to lower the amount of time he was spending on work. I had the following thoughts, prior to starting on the assignment

• He is a top executive in a company that has operations in more than 20 countries
• People working at that level in large companies invariably are working at least 60 hours in a week
• expect that he wants to reduce his hours to around 60 a week

 

I asked him what he wanted to achieve from the coaching. He wanted to reduce his working hours to just 75 hours a week. He revealed that his wife had the expectation that he would put in long hours between Monday to Friday, as her father had been a senior executive with that company and had worked very long hours as well. Working from 5AM until 8PM during the week was fine. It was unacceptable for him to work weekends and unacceptable that he hadnt taken a vacation.

That was his paradigm for balance between work and life.

Your Personal Goals and Achieving Work and Life Balance

You will not achieve the balance you want without managing time effectively. To manage time, goals must first be identified and then there must be an intent to pursue them.To manage time, you have to know

1. What goals do you want to achieve? (your goals
2. How close are you now to achieving each goal?
3. What do you need to do to reach each goal? (plans)

The secret to time management is having these goals and focusing on them all the time.

• A vision of how work ought to be
• A vision of how life ought to be
• Specified goals that will deliver the work vision
• specified goals that will deliver the life vision
• A plan that will achieve each goal
• The skill to remain focussed on your goals
• The skill to manage your time in such a way that you execute the plans and achieve the goals

Your Ability To Manage Time and Achieving Work and Life Balance

The secret to time management is having goals and focussing on them. Your achievement of work and life balance is dependent on your skill in connection with being able to remain focussed on named goals and achieving them.

Distractions abound. They can arrive in the form of an email, a phone call, an ad, a tv program, a visitor, those around us, or a meeting – to name a few sources. A distraction will take you on a tangent and away from doing the things that will help you to reach your specified goal.

To manage your time well, you have to be able to appraise the various opportunities that arise and decide whether or not to persue them. Each of these options will either

• help you to attain your outcome, or
• hinder you in attaining your outcome

 

To be effective at managing your time, you must be selective about the opportunities that you pursue and avoid based upon there relevance to your goal attainment. Here is a quote that I think can help you to manage your time more effectively and achieve the work and life balance that you want

“Time is the coin of your life. It is the only coin you have, and only you can determine how it will be spent. Be careful lest you let other people spend it for you.” – Carl Sandburg

Achieving the right balance of work and life is not a simple thing to do. I know this because I have coached more than 300 senior executives on this matter. It requires some knowledge and skills that you probably do not have as yet and it requires that you to do some personal development work on yourself and what you want from life.

If you really want work life balance, you will achieve it. You will need ongoing guidance and support to achieve it. You can obtain the guidance and support you will need from work and life balance. The author of this material has received The Order Of Merit from the President of the United States.

You may also find it useful to visit learning time management.

Good luck!