Balancing Act – part 1

Most of us struggle to balance everything throughout the day – work, family time, exercise, and if you’re lucky, personal time.

If you’re like me, you have a constant need to be doing something.  Sleep seems to get in the way of more important things and stop lights have become the perfect opportunity to check e-mail or the news – why would someone want to sit for 30 seconds and wait to move forward?  Seems like a waste of time to me. 🙂

The danger in trying to balance everything and always be productive is that it can be all consuming.  Although well intended, it can quickly be a cause of our stress.  Ever get frustrated after completing something because you didn’t accomplish more?  Yep,  humans are a funny bunch.

In this first of two posts, the focus is on the cause of the issues we experience in balancing the day to day.  Below are some of the areas I’ve found that contribute to the problem of balancing everything.  Please share your thoughts on other items that impact your daily balancing act.

• Attempting to do too much:  As much as we hate to admit it, we all have limits.  We have too much to accomplish at one time.  In my case, and I assume most of yours, this is self inflicted.  We try to be all things for everyone, but it’s just not sustainable.

• Digital devices: I’m convinced the majority of the issues we have nowadays are a result of these incredibly handy devices.  As a tech guy, I love them.  Nothing in my lifetime has made life easier or connected us to the rest of the world.

They can certainly help with productivity, but I cannot tell you how many nights I have wasted while trying to multi task by working from a phone while trying to be engaged with my family.  I don’t remember the emails or articles I was reading, but I can remember the names of the movies or games I missed watching/playing with my family.

• Unclear objectives:  What do we need to accomplish and why?  Often, I’ve found that I jump in to something to check off the list without fully understanding what I need to do.

For example, my goals of backing up my phone usually ends up with me going through a couple hundred GB of old photos to start categorizing appropriately for the next time.  It’s a value add task, but makes a 15 minute task grow into several hours.

• Not having boundaries:   The boundaries of when we work, when we spend time with family, and  when we do activities around house have all become blurred.   Instead of focusing on one thing and checking it off the list, we attempt to multi task and do a little of one of several tasks.  As a result we feel that we come up short and because we looked at all of our tasks, are reminded of the amount we still have to do, which only adds to our stress.

In part two of the post, the discussion will turn to ways to prioritize work and overcome these challenges.  In the meantime, please share your feedback on other balancing act difficulties.