Balance your Priorities
How much faster, busier, more hectic and demanding can our lives possibly get?
These past two months have been especially challenging for me with numerous family issues and my own health concerns. Although I study life balance and help others through my teaching, speaking, writing and coaching I found myself bursting at the same seams I’ve helped others better handle. All of my techniques and strategies were in my tool box and once I took a deep breadth, re-focused, and took things more slowly I was able to manage day-to-day and see the rainbow at the end of all the rain that was pouring down in my life.
Living a balanced life has become one of the biggest challenges in our society. However, as I’ve learned from my own experiences, until you get your thinking and actions aligned, you’ll naturally be out of balance. To be in balance, you need to align your life with your top priorities and live that way each and every day!
Your priorities come from your core — your personal values. They define what is really most important to you. They help guide your decisions about where and how you will spend your time, money and energy.
If you want to live a balanced life, begin by defining your core values and key priorities. Define what life balance means to you.
A blanket answer will not resonate with every one of you. We will have different answers to what’s important to us and what life balance looks like for us. Life balance is a concept that has a different meaning for each of us. What’s a balanced lifestyle for one, might not be balanced for another.
The key to getting the right balance, is making time for what’s important to you.
Begin with the end in mind
Posted this piece at Manpower’s Experis page to help remind you of the importance of managing your busy life, controlling your time, making more effective decisions, and becoming more proactive, productive, efficient and balanced in the way you live your life. Please add your comments!
Rejuvenate and Relax!
There is an art to taking vacation and getting the rest and rejuvenation you need. Here are some important tips posted in my blog at MyPath that will help you prevent work from spilling over into your personal time.
Surviving Work Overload
These days I continually here about employees at every level of the organization who are overloaded with too much work. This chronic problem is mostly a result of numerous workforce reductions and vacation schedules. Many of us have experienced that dreadful sense of having far too much work to do and too little time to do it in. The option is to ignore it because you are “too busy” and to work unreasonably long hours just to stay on top of your workload. Unfortunately, the risk is that you may build up resentment, exhaustion and frustration that leads to poor quality work while you neglect other areas of your life and eventually experience intense levels of stress.
Some of the key signs that you or others may be overloaded include:
- A boss with no real sense of your job
- Increased sick leave
- A sharp rise in complaints
- Poor synergy with a team of co-workers
- Conversation breakdowns
- More consistently working longer hours and weekends
- Increase in turnover
- Increase in customer complaints
- Inefficient meetings
- Improper delegation of tasks
- Constant interruptions & distractions
- Too many emails, text messages, etc.
- Feel totally out-of-control or overwhelmed
- Employees complaining about work/life issues, limited career opportunities, or lack of skill development. If you colleagues are leaving in droves, find out why!
Work more intelligently by focusing on the things that are important for job success and reduce the time you spend on lower priority tasks. I found a tool on line at the Mind Tools site, which can help you take the first step in looking at your work, Job Analysis. According to information on their site, job analysis is a key technique for managing job overload – an important source of stress.
Also, try out some of these simple, popular and often effective solutions to many of the problems frequently encountered in the work environment:
- Proactively discuss with your boss the inefficiencies related to constant change and propose some realistic boundaries.
- Establish boundaries around when you can and cannot be interrupted by employees or colleagues.
- Turn on your phone only during designated hours or have your secretary impose a heavy filter on the incoming phone calls. If you are the secretary, keep conversations brief and get all necessary details during the first call.
- Prioritize your e-mail and correspondence. Don’t leave the email indicator on unless it’s absolutely critical for your job.
- Accept the possibility of a complete turn-about in your work as a result of uncertainties. Learn to reprioritize when change is necessary.
- Only permit emergency calls at work from family, friends, and neighbors.
10 Tips for Balancing Work & Family Life
Read this article in the May issue of Treasure Coast Parenting to learn tips you can use in your own life to gain more balance.
http://www.tcparenting.com/0511%20-%20May%20Webzine/index.html
Can We Really Have it All?
Prevent Burnout
Help for Managing your Full Plate
Your burgeoning work load—not to mention the rest of your life—means you have a very full plate. But managing the mountains on your full plate just got easier! You have all the utensils on hand to more effectively handle those competing demands and conflicting priorities!
Read more….
https://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=195973563775485
Adjust Priorities
When emergencies or catastophes strike, cars break down, accidents occur, or health issues arise, priorities often shift on a dime. It could take just seconds to temporarily or permanently change your entire life.
As your time and attention changes to more pressing matters, what do you do with whatever is still left on your plate? How do you continue tending to the important when the urgent is so compelling?
Reflecting on the recent tragedies in the world, including the earthquake and Tsunami in Japan, the major flooding, the bus accident on Route 95 in New York and other such events across the globe I wonder how people cope. Although I had no one personally from my family, friends or professional colleagues in the World Trade Center when the tragedy of 9-1-1 occured, we were fixated with the events. Those like me, in the peripheral, went on with our lives and work and continued to focus on other priorities.
However, when it affects you personally, you may be immobilized and fixated on the necessary actions although other priorities continue to exist in your life. Balancing your other needs and those of your loved ones is likely a challenge. For those who have lived through a death of a loved one, accident, sudden emergency, natural disaster big or small….how did you cope? What are some suggestions you have for others who may now be going through similar experiences?
Coping with “To-Do” Overload
Research continues to show that we considerably perform better and faster when tasks are done sequentially rather than all at once, as in multitasking. Brain function diminishes as we work on projects simultaneously or switch between several different tasks.
Here are some quick tips to better cope with your overloaded to-do list:
- When mistakes matter, avoid multitasking!
- When you must multitask, choose what you want to execute quickly and (possibly) mindlessly rather than be able to absorb or concentrate on it.
- When you want to learn something new, focus on that one item.
- Pair different kinds of tasks rather than tasks that are relatively the same because same types use the same part of the brain and can easily lead to overwhelm or mistakes.
- Match tasks with different modalities, such as listening to music with no lyrics while reading instead of music with lyrics because the brain gets confused with too many words to process at once.
- Focus on each task’s relative importance. For example, rather than just playing a video game, pay attention to specific aspects of the game and then evaluate how well your performance improves in that area.
- Make at least one task routine. As you repeat a task, you increase your competence and confidence at completing it. If you repeat a set of skills over and over in exactly the same way, you are likely to get noticeably better.
Results tend to be worse when you multitask but in some cases, they’re especially compromised.
