All of us acknowledge that we want to live lives that are in balance. We understand that focusing on one or two areas of our lives and excluding others will lead to problems, and isn’t healthy.
I hope you don’t expect that I’m going to give you “three easy steps” to bring balance to your life. I’m not. I don’t have perfect balance in my life, so how could I tell you how to obtain that in your life?
What I can do is tell you some of the techniques that work for me to obtain a measure of balance that may or may not help you. These are not “The Way,” so feel free to modify, use or ignore those techniques that don’t resonate with you.
The Misnomer of Work/Life Balance
It’s been popular to refer to the topic of life balance with the phrase, “work/life balance.” I imagine this shorthand phrase developed because, in our culture, people have a tendency to focus primarily on their work, sometimes excluding everything else.
The phrase “work/life balance” divides our lives into only two categories: work and life. Is working not a part of life? It gives too much emphasis to only one aspect of life, our work. Even when this phrase is understood as a reference to professional/personal life, why does “professional” get a whole category to itself, and everything else gets lumped into “personal?” To me, it infers a value judgment.
It makes more sense for me to talk about “life balance.” My life is not made up of just two aspects, two categories, or two roles. Life balance includes all the aspects of my life, without making any arbitrary divisions.
What Is Life Balance?
Life balance doesn’t mean giving equal time and focus to all aspects of my life. I’m not thinking of the kind of balance we picture with a balancing scale, where both sides are of equal weight.
It’s impractical and undesirable to define life balance as giving equal time and attention to all areas of my life. Occasionally one area of my life needs more focus than another does because of circumstances. When I’m focused on writing a blog post, I’m not focused on every other role in my life.
My definition of life balance is to give appropriate attention and focus to all the aspects of my life. This includes my roles as husband, father, friend, lifelong learner, teacher, healthy person, reliable person, and hobbyist.
How much time I give each of these roles will vary widely. It depends on their nature, circumstances, and what I intuitively feel is the proper balance in my life.
Life balance isn’t something you achieve. You never arrive at a state of balance and stay that way. Life is a constant balancing act. Everything in life is always in motion and changing.
How Do I Determine What is Balance in My Life?
If life balance is achieved when I “give appropriate attention” to one or another of my roles, how do I determine what is appropriate attention? There’s no easy answer. Having been a practicing attorney, I’m allowed to use the famous lawyer’s answer here, “It depends.”
The answer depends on many factors, some of which are competing. Should I focus on my relationship with my wife or my friends right now? Should I engage in a favorite hobby or spend time doing yard work?
There are no simple, easy answers. Each of us must develop a sense of what our priorities are, what is important to us, and when it is appropriate for us to spend time on one role in life rather than another. It is a decision that no one else can make for you. Some factors to consider:
- Sometimes the circumstances help us to determine what we need to be doing. For example, if your car breaks down, your priority is to do what is necessary to get it repaired. If there’s a crisis in your family, you might have to drop everything else to attend to that.
- Or, maybe there will be negative consequences if you don’t attend to something. That can make it a priority. If I don’t give some time and attention at some point to maintaining my home, expensive repairs may be needed in the future.
- Furthermore, how much time I spend on a role is determined in part by the nature of that role itself. I spend much more time on my role as a husband than I do on my role as a son to my aging father.
Many times we have time available, but no emergencies or circumstances that demand our attention. That’s when it’s more difficult to decide what role to focus on.
For me, at times my best guide is my sense of how I need to divide my time among several roles. Recently, I had an evening with a three-hour block of unscheduled time. I could have spent all three hours playing a computer war game, thus spending all the time on one of my hobbies.
Instead, I spent one hour watching an episode of Vikings with my wife, one hour playing a game, and one hour reading. It seemed appropriate to divide the time between three of my roles: husband, hobbyist, and lifelong learner.
How Do I Remember All the Roles in My Life?
My primary difficulty in living a reasonably balanced life is my memory and focus. When I get engaged with one role, I tend to forget about the other roles in my life. I don’t give appropriate attention to other areas because I’ve forgotten about them. It’s easy for me to get focused on one or two areas and forget about the rest of my roles.
I realized a long time ago that I needed a system that would periodically remind me of all the roles in my life. I needed a review process.
The technique that has worked best for me this last year is to have weekly reviews of my roles. During these reviews, I read a description I have written about how I would ideally behave in each of my roles, and ask three questions (these questions were unashamedly stolen from David Sparks) about each:
- How am I doing?
- Where can I get better?
- Where am I doing good?
Weekly reviews remind me of all the life roles I have, not just the ones I happen to be obsessing over. I have a repeating reminder in my task manager, Things, that reminds me every Sunday it’s time to do a review.
How A Life-Roles-Based System Helps Bring Balance to My Life
In January 2022, I did a three-day retreat in which I inventoried my life roles and wrote an ideal description of how I would look if I were living up to each role. I evaluated each role and developed action items for each role. I followed the process outlined by David Sparks in his Personal Retreat Video and Planning PDF.
This process helped me to identify my life roles and analyze them, which helped me to understand what was important to me. When I think about these roles, I realize that they make up everything that is valuable and significant to my life. You can’t balance your life if you don’t know what the categories or roles are that you need to balance.
The factor that has made a continuing difference for me is doing weekly reviews of my roles. I’ve created Craft documents that list all of my roles, with links to separate role pages that list my ideal description for each role, and also my three review questions.
Weekly reviews are valuable and productive for me because every week I’m reminded of all the areas of my life that need appropriate attention, not just the ones I’ve been focused on. It helps me to break out of my tunnel vision, and be reminded that there are other important things in my life I need to attend to.
Last week I was focused on researching and writing several blog posts, and preparing and delivering a public education program that included preparing a Keynote presentation and several screencasts.
When I did my weekly review on Sunday afternoon, I realized I hadn’t given any attention to my relationship with my friends and had failed to meet my goal of contacting at least one friend a week. I could have done it, but I forgot all about it while focusing on everything else. That afternoon, I took a few minutes and texted a friend.
Consider Using a Life-Roles-Based System to Help Balance Your Life
If you’re like me, to bring a sense of balance to your life you first need to clearly define what are the different aspects, or roles, that make up your life. Write a description of your desired ideal behavior in each role. This helps you to define what’s important to you, and also gives you a standard to compare your behavior with. This is foundational for finding balance because you have to have a clear concept of what factors you are balancing.
Next, consider doing a weekly review of your roles and ideal behavior descriptions. You need to periodically remind yourself of all the aspects of your life. You will forget about some of them while you’re focusing on others, and need to be reminded. Doing so will help you to discover what aspects of your life you have been neglecting, so you can take corrective action.
Be gentle with yourself. Life balance is an art, not a science. You will realize at times that your life is out of balance. It doesn’t do any good to beat yourself up about it. Instead, resolve to do better and make changes in your behavior to bring more balance.