Creating a Balanced Life

Most people wrestle with the feeling of being balanced. Hold things steady across the seven areas of a life (health, emotions, work, family, friends, finances, and spirituality) and you have taken on something genuinely hard. The common situation now is doing more with less. People take on extra hours or a second job to cover the bills, chase their kids through school and activities, try to stay well enough to avoid getting sick (and, on a good week, squeeze in some exercise), and keep all of it inside a budget.

One area tipping over tends to tip others. Poor health can bleed into trouble at work, strain on money, and a shaky emotional state. For a lot of people who feel like they're going under a little more each day, balance sounds like a fantasy. So is it only a dream, or something you can actually reach?

Start by prioritizing. Lay out what needs doing and rank it. Some tasks can sink to the bottom and wait for spare time; others you've been avoiding have to climb up. Say laundry sat at the bottom of the list Monday and stayed there four days running. By now it jumps to the top, or you run out of clean clothes. Tracking priorities this way does three things at once: it shows you what's left, it lets you see the wins you've already banked, and it keeps the unfinished items in view.

Then separate important from urgent. Important means it has to happen. Urgent means it has to happen now. Not everything is urgent, and some of what we label important turns out not to be. Getting the kids' homework finished tonight is important at 4pm. The same task at 9pm is urgent. Urgent wins. One way to keep things sitting at important rather than sliding into urgent is to work ahead of them. Write down the day's tasks. Build a schedule with goals you can actually hit. Everyone has assumed something would take ten minutes and lost an hour to it, so if a job might run an hour to ninety minutes, block ninety. Finish early and you've got room for the next thing or a short breather. Extra time beats running behind.

Define your needs, then say them to the people who can do something about it. That sounds easy. Asking for help often isn't. Sometimes you know you're underwater but can't name what would actually lift you out. Picture being the only one who (1) drives the kids to school before work, (2) collects them afterward, (3) starts dinner once homework is done, and then (4) handles baths and bedtime before you finally get five minutes to yourself. That's the point to ask. Talk to your spouse about covering a pickup or a homework session. Ask a relative or friend about carpooling a couple of days a week. Small bits of relief like these cut the overwhelm and give back some sense of balance.

Learn to say no. Turning down a request can be very hard, but no doesn't make you mean. It's you naming your limits and choosing where your time goes. Say yes to too much and you end up swamped and off-kilter. Know where your edges are and get comfortable naming them out loud.

Balance in your life is within reach. Work at these habits and you can find the kind of steadiness you're after. It takes time and repetition, so give it both. - Kim B.