According to A. Roger Merrill and Rebecca R. Merrill, time and money are as important in attaining a comfortable work/life balance as work and family. Unfortunately, the way people spend their time and money often does not reflect what is important to them in this balance. In Life Matters, Merrill and Merrill offer advice on how to organize your life to prioritize what really matters to you. Their advice hinges on three important “Gotta Do’s”:
- Validate expectations. Your perception of situations has a drastic effect on your thoughts, expectations, and actions. You must learn to align your expectations with reality — which means understanding what you can realistically expect from yourself and others — and set realistic goals.
- Optimize effort. Once you have developed realistic expectations, you must put your efforts towards achieving what is realistic in all aspects of life, such as love, occupational success, etc.
- Develop “navigational intelligence.” You must be able to make good judgements based on your personal priorities when faced with unexpected opportunities that might lead you to deviate from your plan or change your perceptions of what are realistic expectations. To do this, you must constantly define and redefine your values based on your experience and your personal insight.
Balancing work, family, time, and money
Here are some other tips from Life Matters on validating your expectations and establishing a balance in these four important areas:
- Ask yourself how you see your work — as a joy, a necessary evil, an escape? The pleasure and satisfaction you get from work affects how and why you work. Working primarily out of economic necessity, as many people do, can make people feel trapped and afraid of losing their jobs. Working to provide for loved ones, however, can be one of the most fulfilling work motives, if it is perceived as being an important function of family life and not as solely career- or material-oriented. Work should become a visible manifestation of your love for your family.
- Optimize your time at work by focusing on your specific role in the organization; being proactive about getting things done; doing work that utilizes your strengths and talents; seeking feedback and constantly striving to improve; and developing good, productive work habits.
- Connect your work to your family by participating in career days at school; sharing positive work experiences with the family; teaching your children to work hard and why it is important; and being aware of what is happening in your partner’s and children’s lives and keeping in touch through notes or e-mail.
- Ask yourself what your role in the family is. Is work where you contribute to your family, and home where you crash? While a satisfying home life does require both work and sacrifice, you should see both home and work as areas where you can contribute.
- Optimize time with your family by scheduling weekly “family time;” maintaining relationships and having one-on-one time with your partner and your children; showing an interest and getting involved in your children’s projects; and dividing household chores up among all members to maximize time and teach valuable lessons about responsibility and time management.
- Assess your relationship with time. Do you see time as too limited? If you are often frustrated with how much needs to be done in so little time, you may need to reassess whether your expectations are aligned with reality or to focus more on getting things done and out of the way.
- Don’t let interruptions irritate you as, particularly with the family, they may be an opportunity to respond to something that is more important to you that what you are busy with.
- Don’t keep yourself busy doing lots of little things to gain a sense of accomplishment; you will feel much better if you prioritize, focus on major tasks, and work on them until they are complete.
- Discern between things that are urgent and things that are important. Some things, like meeting a deadline or taking a sick child to the doctor, are both urgent and important. Others, like attending unnecessary meetings or making it home in time for a television show, may be urgent but not really important. Time wasted doing these latter activities could be better spent doing other important things, like building networks at work or having family time, that are not necessarily urgent.
- Optimize time by making weekly plans; prioritizing time-sensitive tasks versus any-time tasks; tracking your time to see where you are devoting too much to unimportant things or too little to things that matter most; and building relationships and relying on those you trust to help.
- Both money and time should be invested in things that will make our lives better, not just consumed. How you spend both time and money should reflect what matters most to you.
- Do not assume that having more money and nicer things will being you more happiness. Often, the price for luxuries is greater than just money and can include deteriorating health and relationships.
- How you manage your income is more important than your level of income. It would seem that an increase in income is the obvious way to solve financial stresses, but more money usually results in less time at home, a higher tax rate, and greater job-related expenses.
- Providing children with the best clothes, supplies, and schools does not necessarily give them better opportunities in life. Rather than working longer hours to make more money, you and your family would benefit more if you devoted that extra time to help your children develop character strengths such as integrity, determination, thrift, and the ability to prioritize and make sacrifices.
- Optimize your usage of the money you have by tracking your spending to see where it is being wasted or where it does not reflect what matters most to you, planning your long- and short-term financial goals and focusing on them whenever you are tempted to waste money.