Life is like a multi-ring circus where you are performing in all the rings simultaneously, having to do several jobs at the same time, and you want to be successful in all of them. If you spend too much time or effort in only one or two of them, you will surely fail in achieving the expected goals on the other ones.
But what specifically is meant by “several jobs” or, for that matter, “planning for balance”? Well, for starters you need to work or study, depending on the life phase you are living at this moment. Another important aspect you need to have is a social life; you need to spend time with your family and friends. Other facets that can also help you are having a spiritual or transcendental goal, making time for physical and mental activities, working continuously on your self-development, and spending time on leisure activities and/or your personal hobbies.
Achieving and maintaining a balanced life is important because it helps reduce stress and helps prevent burnout in any other areas you spend most of your time, like your workplace, the university or college, your studio, or even your home, if that’s the place where you work. Also, chronic stress produced by an imbalance in lifecan negatively impact your mental health, leading sometimes to physical health problems, because it’s linked to a higher risk of depression, anxiety and insomnia. According to a Harvard Business School survey, 94% of service professionals put in 50+ hours a week. And while some people claim long hours are necessary, study after study shows that when we lose work life balance, everyone suffers the consequences.
To properly balance your life, calculate how much available time you have. The number of hours in a week is 7 times 24 or 168 hours per week. You need 9 hours of sleep per night and 8 hours to work, which includes lunch, during weekdays. If you add the hours of sleep and work, you end up with 103 hours. Subtract those hours from the total week hours, that will leave you with 65 hours for you to balance all your activities for the rest of the week.
As you can see, from the calculation above, the bad news is that you end up with only 65 hours, or less than 40%, of “free” timeto do with it as you please. The good news is that you can combine all the other activities to create the balance you are lookingforin a more effective way, that is, you can have breakfast with your family, dinner with your friends, practice your favorite sport, hobby or activity with your spouse or significant other, and so on. How you spend your time and what you do with it is entirely your decision. There is no perfect way to do it, but there is always an efficient way to do it, and that involves planning and execution.
A way you can plan for balance, the way I personally do it, is to compromise on a schedule. Assign certain activities to certain times on all days of the week and try to stick to that schedule. If you can’t do a certain activity at a certain time, just re-schedule that activity to another slot during the same week. The goal is not to execute your activities specifically at certain days and times, thegoal is to do all the activities set for a week on that week.Take your life schedule as you do your exercise routine in the gym, it doesn’t matter the order you exercise your muscle groups as long as you complete all the exercises. Instead of developing your different muscle groups to obtain body balance, you’ll be working on your daily activities to achieve the balance you need for your life.
Finally, you have to plan for big events, that is, events that do not happen on a weekly basis. These events are an important part of a balanced, well planned life, and should be scheduled on a annual calendar instead of weekly calendar, and include activities like vacations, seminars for self-development, sport events that you watch or participate, social gatherings with friends and family, and any other leisure, hobby and/or entertainment activities that need an entire day or more on your schedule. These activities usually require traveling time, so make sure to plan ahead of time and also schedule the traveling time.
So, there you have it, start with planning the Monday-Friday day to day, or weekly activities, then plan for the weekends and finish your planning process defining your yearly activities. I’ll go into more detail on the activities later, as we review the life planning process.