Personal Balance

Shawnee Love   •  
July 7, 2011

I occasionally get asked by someone I am working with about how to do it all: e.g., work, exercise, eat right, travel, spend time with family, have fun, practice an instrument, read, clean the house, get groceries, run errands, socialize, call your parents, sleep, etc. The reality is you can’t do it all every day. What you can do is set priorities and make those the things you spend 80% of your time on. The remaining 20% you can use for the things that aren’t priorities, and that means you will not get to do them all daily, weekly, or sometimes even monthly. (Pareto’s rule strikes again!)

When deciding what your priorities are, think about what you want in 5 -10 years. The top 3 to 5 things you know you want to have flourishing are your priorities which you should be spending 80% of your time working on or towards. Everything else falls into the remaining 20% or thereabouts.

Even if our priorities change over time, if you have been giving drips of attention to the things in your 20%, you should be able to nurture a newly important priority back to health by moving it into the 80% group.

So this is what works for me, what strategies do you use to keep balanced?