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The Work-Life Balance Trap

Work-life balance has become a popular buzzword lately. Everyone wants to be the best employee, partner, parent, and friend. If you have a type-A personality, it’s easy to feel like you’re failing on all fronts.

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One of my clients described work-life balance as a see-saw. It wobbles back and forth. Sometimes, one side gets heavier than the other. But it never reaches a point of equilibrium.

 

Why is this a trap? Because we try to force a perfect balance when none is possible. For example, what if your daughter’s dance recital is at the same time as a board meeting? You can do one or the other; you can’t do both.

FACTS:

  • Time and attention are finite resources.

  • When you choose to do something, you are literally paying for it with your life.

  • Choosing to do one thing means choosing not to do the numerous other things you could have done. (Economists call that opportunity cost.)

  • Even if you set your goals and tradeoffs in an ideal way, little fires and other distractions will tempt you away along the journey.

  • At the end of your life, if you picked the wrong things, or picked more than you could get done, you will be in a place of regret, rather than a place of fulfillment and contentment.

Every time we choose to do something a it’s an implicit decision not to do something else. Take five years to found a new company, and you can forget about writing that book you’re thinking of. This is painful, because we crave to do more than we can accomplish during our brief time on this planet 

 

A perfect work-life balance is like the legendary yeti. You can go to the Himalayas and search for him; but I did that, and I promise you, he isn’t there! Instead, I developed the Sherpa System to help people choose. Whatever you do, choose deliberately. Otherwise, the Storm will choose for you.

SOLUTIONS:

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Create a 
“Do-not-Do” list, and make a commitment not to do any of the things on it.

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Add a 
“Life Priorities” column to your
Attention Budget.

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Decide in advance what you'll only be marginal at. 

At the end of your life, who you’ve become, what you accomplished, how you grew, and who’s there at the end with you will be the sum of what you chose to pay attention to each hour, day, and year of your life.

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