October 12, 2021

Hi Tina,

Finding the Balance of Competing Devotions

These days, the ultimate question may not be “What is the meaning of life?”, but simply, “Where do I find the time?”

Between our work and personal lives (family, friends, exercise, sports, hobbies, community commitments), most of us have seriously overbooked ourselves. We strive so hard to “have it all”—fantastic work and other services that we’re passionate about, and passionate home lives that we work hard to nurture.

But with so many competing devotions, so many passions we must feed, we most often find ourselves just plain worn out. The stress can lead to health problems, poor sleep and fatigue, which means we get even less done (or take less pleasure in what we do accomplish). Ultimately, frustration mounts, our relationships suffer, and we wonder what went wrong.

To break out of the out-of-balance cycle and achieve better balance between our competing devotions, consider some of the following techniques, from the spiritual to the eminently practical.

Know Your Priorities 
The near universal advice for creating life balance is to start with some process of getting in touch with your priorities, which reflect your values. What are you about? What is important to you? Without some sense of these priorities as an anchor, it is almost impossibly difficult to battle the buffeting of daily life that fractures your time.

Take Care of Yourself 
Your ability to devote time and energy to the rest of your life ultimately depends upon your inner resources. A common trap is to feel selfish about taking time for yourself—to exercise, relax, enjoy a hobby, cook a special meal and, of course, to get enough sleep. So, to avoid that feeling, we often place those activities lower in priority than taking care of the other obligations of our lives. But the low priority items often don’t happen, and we end up feeling somewhere on the spectrum between self-righteousness and martyrdom. Either way, we aren’t taking care of ourselves.

Schedule Creatively 
In my book, Teetering: A Frazzled Overworked Person’s Guide to Find Balance and Embrace Change, I share numerous approaches for building balance into your life when your job is absorbing every waking minute, and then some. Again, it starts with understanding your priorities to help arm yourself with the fortitude to make difficult changes. But to shore up that fortitude, from my own real life experiences of burnout, I offer recommendations on several scheduling techniques as a way of controlling your time at work.

One of these, is “strategic color coded, time-blocking,” which is scheduling activities in sections to accommodate safe boundaries and assure your scheduled events are in alignment with your priorities or core values. At a glance you’ll quickly see which colored activities are absorbing most of your time, then you can begin to make the shift so you’re more in control of where you’re putting most of your energy.  

Start With Your “To-Do” List 
Productivity guru David Allen is one of the few writers in the field who takes a fundamentally different view of the “priorities first” approach. Instead of starting with priorities, he recommends in his book Getting Things Done that you start with your “in box”—by which he means everything on your current list of things to do. Everything. He says a typical person has 200-300 tasks floating around in their lives—in their head, on little slips of paper squirreled away in various places, in their organizer (or backed up in their email inbox), on post-it notes stuck to their computer screen, and so on. This backlog of tasks uses up too much of your brain—which is poorly equipped to organize this kind of list—and creates unnecessary stress.

But Allen doesn’t suggest that you prioritize these to-dos at all: Fixing the dripping faucet goes on the list right next to planning for the kids’ college education. The key to Allen’s system is getting all the to-dos out of your head and into some trusted system so you don’t have to worry about forgetting them. With your head clear, your instincts take over and you will find that the right things are getting done.

Allen recommends reviewing your life from various “altitudes”—from your vision for the coming year to your vision for your whole life—to get in touch with your priorities and your goals for balance in your life…but only after you have control of that in-box.

With your mind clear, you can step back and take stock of your life. Your creative juices will be flowing to help you find that delicious state of grace in which your devotions at work and at home actually enhance each other, not deplete each other.

What techniques have you used to help balance out your days? Send me a note, I’d love to hear from you.

To your success,

Tina Asher
Business/Career Coach • Trainer • Author
Build U Up Consulting

Author’s content used under license, © Claire Communications

Recommended Reading

A friend of mine just published a book for the healthcare professionals, check it out.

Amy Lafko shares how you can design an exceptional healthcare practice in her new book People First. By following her advice and focusing on your most important asset (your team), you will free up space to scale and grow your business while providing outstanding customer service. Click here to get your copy. 

My Chaos to Charisma course is currently under way. If you missed this round, click here to be notified when the next session begins.  

Helpful Resources

Managers & Leaders: Download this free guide to discover where you might be out of balance so you can become a better boss.

Career Help: Unsure about your job? Download this free tool to assess your career and see where you might be out of balance. 

Better Communication: Want to communicate better with your co-workers and family? This three-part self-study course "Building Better Communication" is designed to help you better understand yourself and the people in your life.

Connect with Me: Click here to schedule a complimentary Strategy Session to chat about how I can help you better communicate with and develop your team and build you up for success. 

Tina Asher
Career Coach • Trainer • Author

With 20+ years in leading, training, sales management, and coaching, Tina Asher brings a broad skillset to helping busy professionals elevate their success. She holds certifications with one of the world's leading sources for science-based, validated assessment and coaching tools. Tina is passionate about serving others to reach their full potential while balancing a full and productive life.

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