We were talking to a young woman trying to figure out how to maintain more of a balance in her life. She knows that one of the challenges with energized moods is that they can lead to becoming over-committed. On the other hand, one of the great things about that energy is that it often results in getting a lot done. So how do you find a balance between those two?
The issue of balance comes up a lot in our conversations. On the one hand, finding a balance, seems like such a sensible thing, and on the other hand, often when we try to figure out what that balance would look like it begins to seem a lot like a straight jacket. This is the reason we came up with the idea of a dynamic balance. It isn’t a static balance in which things never change (every week I spend 4 hours a week exercising, three hours a week with my kids, etcetera, etcetera). But rather a process of examination and reexamination and adjustment and change that’s more like a dance or the graceful moves of a martial artist than a statue.
One key to achieving this dynamic balance is having some way of keeping track of the areas or aspects of your life that are important. We have really found the idea of creating a list of important life roles and spending time each week examining how we are doing with those roles to be very valuable. This comes out of Stephen Covey’s book First Things First and is embedded in the Franklin Covey planners.
Basically the idea is to identify the key roles in your life, the aspects of yourself that are important. For instance, spouse, parent, child, friend, dentist, professional, colleague, etc. In addition to a list of roles that is mostly focused on social interactions and work and hobbies, Stephen Covey asked us to think about the importance of “sharpening the saw”. This means as we look at how we are fulfilling these roles we also need to look at whether we are taking care of ourselves. Or are we getting dull by too much work and not enough sleep.
Once a week, for perhaps a half an hour each week, rather than just focusing on the little tasks and to-dos that we need to accomplish, look at the big picture. How are we spending our time day by day and week by week and are there aspects of ourselves that are important that we’re neglecting. Is it perhaps the case that being a writer or artist or accomplishing some task that never quite shows up in day to day thinking is nevertheless, very important to defining who we are and what our life’s mission is?
After you identify the roles, and add “sharpening the saw” to the list create a table with the list of roles down the left hand side and then three columns for what your overall goals are, how you did meeting those goals last week and what one or two things you can do next week that will move you toward those goals.
You can do this review at either end of the week: on Friday or Saturday at the end of the week or on Sunday or Monday at the beginning of the next week. The idea is to reflect on the past week and to plan for the next week.