Balancing Your Life’s Responsibilities.

Hello, and welcome to episode 270 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host for this show.

So, if you’re listening to this podcast, the chances are you have an interest in managing your time and being more productive. And that’s a great interest to have, but the real question is why? Why do you want to better manage your time? Is it because you feel you have too much to do or it seems all you ever do is work work work?

The real reason why anyone would want to better manage their time is because they want more balance in their lives. After all, we have a lot of lives to manage. At a basic level, we have our professional and personal lives, but inside those, we may have different roles. We could be a mother, a daughter, a sister. We may have interests such as painting or sketching.

At a professional level, we could be a manager of people, an accountant, a salesperson or a project manager—it’s likely you are all of these. You need to manage your team, allocate your department’s budget and make sure your projects are moving forward.

The realities of life today is that there will always be something you have to do. It can be difficult to bring any kind of balance into our lives. Yet, it may be difficult, but it’s certainly not impossible if you focus on what’s important to you.

That, nicely leads me to this week's question, which means it’s time to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week's question.

This week’s question comes from Mary-Anne. Mary Anne asks: Hi Carl, I know you and many other people in the time management world talk a lot about planning the day and week, but I find it’s impossible. I have two teenage daughters, a full-time career, and I have to take care of my father, who needs full-time care. I find it impossible to get any balance. There are just too many demands on me. What would you say to someone who is really struggling to find some kind of balance in their day?

Hi Mary Anne, thank you for your question.

That’s a great question, and I know it can be very hard to organise everything when other people are involved. The good news is, somehow you are managing everything. It might feel like you are juggling a lot of balls each day, but it does appear from your question that you are not dropping any.

Now, we must return to the fact that time is fixed. You only have 24 hours a day. What that means is the only control you have is what you do in those twenty-four hours.

Before we can move on, though, we need to look at out areas of focus. The eight areas that are important to all us. These range from our family and relationships to our career and self development. Now these eight areas will change in importance as we go through life.

When we are in our twenties, it’s likely our education (self development) and career are near the top of our list. As we settle down into adulthood, finances and lifestyle become more important. As we age, family and friends become more and more of a priority and our career drops down the list. Your areas of focus are dynamic. As we go through the different stages of life they change in importance.

Now, looking at what you wrote, Mary-Anne, it seems your family and relationships and career are at the top of your list. Knowing that, means when you sit down to plan your week, you begin with these two areas. If you need to attend to your father two or three times a day, then that’s what you need to do. It becomes a non-negotiable part of your day.

Your teenage daughters may be able to help you here, or maybe not, either way, as teenagers, they will likely have some independence—may even demand some independence. Encouraging them to take on more responsibility for their lives, will not only help you it will also help them.

With you career, you need to establish what your core work is. The work you are employed to do. This does not mean the results; for example, if you have to make $20,000 in sales each week, that’s the outcome, the result you want. Your core work is the activity that will produce that result. That could be you need to make ten calls to prospective customers and have three appointments on your calendar each day. Making those calls and setting up those appointments are your core work activities.

These need to be your priority each day you are at work. You do not want to confuse results with activity. To get the results you want, you need to identify the activities that will give you those results.

You can also bring this to your family. What are the results you want, and then determine what the activities are that will bring those results. Those activities are your priorities each day.

So, to give the care you want to give to your father, what do you need to do? That needs to be your priority.

Now, once you know what activities you need to perform each day to bring the results you want, you can make sure they are embedded in your day.

To give you a simple example. Louis, my dog, needs to go for a walk every day and I like to spend an hour exercising. In total two hours, that means two hours of my day have already been taken up before each day begins. The only question I need answer is when? When will I do these activities? For me, I like to break up my day. So, I take Louis out for his walk around 2pm, then when we get back home, I will exercise. My calendar is blocked from 2pm until 4pm each.

I don’t work a typical nine til five job. I work mornings and evenings and do my personal activities in the afternoon. That works for me.

You will likely have work commitments through the day leaving you with the early morning and evening for your family activities.

Now, what about you, Mary-Anne? What do you want to do for yourself?

Balance is all about balancing our commitments to others with the commitments to ourselves. If we spend all our time on the commitments to others, we will feel out of balance and lost. Our lives will be directed by other people and that is never going to be good for you.

You may want some time to yourself for reading, pursuing a hobby or exercise. We all need some “alone time”. It’s what recharges us and help keep us mentally balanced.

Too often we feel guilty about spending time on ourselves, but you should not. It’s healthy and vital if you want the energy to take care of others—which is something we naturally want to do. The problem is you cannot do that if you are exhausted from giving too much of yourself to others.

Time for yourself does not need to be a lot. We’re talking an evening or two a week or an afternoon on a weekend where you can step away and do your own thing.

Whatever time you do set aside for yourself you want to put that on your calendar. It gives you something to look forward to and every time you look at your calendar you’re going to see it. And, once it’s on your calendar, it becomes non-negotiable. You do not sacrifice that time for anyone or anything. Tell everyone that this time is for you. You need to protect it.

I do this with my Saturday nights. Saturday night is the only night each week I have to myself. It begins with a family dinner and once finished, the rest of the evening is my time. To do with whatever I want. I usually settle down to some TV and just wallow in doing absolutely nothing at all.

The key, Mary-Anne, is to step back a little. Prioritise what is important to you and make sure that whatever time you want for the important things in your life are scheduled on your calendar.

While I was away on my quarterly “Strategy week” last week, I undertook to watch all episodes of the early 70s action comedy, The Persuaders! Starring Roger Moore and Tony Curtis. The show was set in the early 70s (perhaps late 60s) and well before the mobile phone or home computer. What I noticed was how less stressed people were. The beauty of paper is it slows everything down. If you needed to send a document you only had one way to do it—the mail (and not email). So there was always around 48 hours to wait before things got completed.

But because everything was slower, we had time for ourselves. Mornings were never rushed, we ate a proper breakfast—bacon and eggs (all natural ingredients) and as there was fewer cars on the road, there were no traffic jams.

I wouldn’t necessarily say it was a better time—but it was a lot slower. Many of the words we use today were not used—burnt out, stressed out and overwhelmed—nobody used those words. There were fewer distractions and finding out the news meant you either watched the 9 O’clock news or sat and read the newspaper.

What we can do is learn from that. Slow down and have fixed times when you do things. What do you do after dinner? Could you not find an hour for yourself and either go read a book or out for walk? Where are the pockets of time that you can use to do the things you want to do to add balance to your own life—rather than serving others?

Ultimately, Mary-Anne, it’s about taking control of your calendar and making sure you have the things you need to do and want to do on there. Task managers and notes apps don’t help here. All these do is tell you what you still have to do. Not helpful if you want to take control of your day and have a more balanced life.

Where possible try to make your activities routine. Routines require a lot less energy because you can do them without thinking. You’re not wasting time thinking about what to do next. You know and you automatically do it. For instance, I go downstairs to cook dinner at 6pm every evening. It’s automatic.

This also means I have some markers in my day. As I mentioned before, I break between 2 and 4pm, then come back to some work until 6pm when I go down to make dinner. These markers mean I can balance my work between these natural breaks in my day.

I should also mention that if you are struggling with doing a weekly plan, then I just launched a new mini course that covers just that. If you hurry, you can get that course for the early-bird discount of $25.00. This course will help you to create plan for the week which will not take you two or three hours to do—forty minutes tops. I’ve put the details of this course in the show notes for you.

I hope that has helped, Mary-Anne. Thank you for your question. And thank you to you too for listening.

It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.