Work-Life Balance 5: Focus on the Most Important First

This continues our discussion on effectively balancing your work and your life

Hopefully, you decided what parts of your life and your work you want to include in your balance. Now we will explore ways to achieve the balance you desire. The next few posts will outline actions that you can take to ensure that you include what you want from both life and work. 

Define Your Roles and Goals

I recommend you use Stephen Covey’s Roles and Goals concept to structure what balance you wish to achieve. You define no more than 7 roles you play in life.  For example, I define the following 7 roles:

1. A Son of God
2. Me, a human being
3. My wife’s husband
4. Father and Grandfather
5. Son and Sibling
6. Career Expert
7. Professional speaker, author, and head of the Larry Stevenson Group

Then set goals for each of the roles. Once again examples:

• As a husband, I want to spend time with my wife on her birthday, my birthday, our anniversary, each Friday evening, and to go visit our grandchildren
• As a father I took annual leave for each of my children’s birthday’s, graduations, recitals, games, performances, and special days

I would consider each role, each goal, and then estimated the time for each role and goal.

Put the Big Stones in First

Stephen Covey’s metaphor for Putting 1st Things 1st applies to this section. So I advise you to watch this clip about pitting the big rocks in first:

Take time during an appropriate season (I use the week between Christmas and New Years Day) to schedule priorities into your calendar:

1. Religious days to worship my God
2. Special days and dates with my wife
3. Birthdays, special events, & performance of my children & now grandchildren
4. Me time
5. Birthdays, reunions, & important days for my parents and siblings
6. Important meetings, events, deadlines, and dates for work
7. Scheduled speeches, deadlines, trips, and meetings for my business

These scheduled events rarely move. I will explain how I protect them in a later post.

Friday we will reveal why people doubt or do not complete this crucial step