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Yesterday I wrote
about work/life balance and some of the things that you can do to make sure
that you’re not just living to work. It
is important - both to your family and friends and for your emotional health -
to have a life that is not focused purely on work.
Yesterday was just the
beginning though. There are so many other things you can do to create a better
work/life balance in your life!
Get Rid of Time and Energy Sucking Activities
Think about the things
that you do each day and consider the value that they are adding to your
life. Many people spend time doing
things that don’t make them happy and don’t make their relationships better but
they do them out of habit or boredom.
One of the things you
can do is create a time budget. Just like
when you create a money budget, the first thing you need to know is where you
are spending your time. Exactly what are
you doing every day? Start keeping a
time journal and do it for at least a week.
Write down everything you do/did and how long you spent doing it. At the end of a week, go back and look at how
you spent your time. For each activity,
ask yourself how it benefited you. Did
it add value to your life in any way? Do
you need to spend that much time on that activity for it to provide value?
Get rid of the time
and energy suckers!
Some of the things you
might want to get rid of include:
- Time spent on the phone listening to the neighborhood gossip
- Time spent on the Internet
- Time spent watching television
- Time spent chatting after work in the office
- Time spent running errands
Find creative ways to
take those out of your time budget so you have more time for things you
actually enjoy doing with people you like!
The truth is that it
is easy to get caught up in time and energy sucking activities because they don’t
require us to use our brain. They are
generally pretty much thoughtless activities but they don’t help us in any way
or they don’t add to our life. They just
kill time!
Many of these things
we do out of habit or we do them because we’ve never really thought about not
doing them. It is just habit to let the
neighborhood gossip tell us about what she just heard and it is mildly
entertaining so we don’t try to stop her.
Watching television is an easy way to pass the time at night.
The good news is that
with some effort you can get rid of these things. And once you’re no longer doing them you will
be thrilled to find that you suddenly have time to do arts and crafts with your
kids or you have time to go to the park after dinner or you might even have
time to go on a date with your spouse!
