SIGNPOSTS
Balancing act
by Adair Good
Work-life balance – we’ve heard it bandied around but what does it mean?
It’s about treating ourselves with respect, treating our bodies as temples and looking after our well-being. It’s the balance between working all hours of the day and night and having some sort of personal or family life.
So how do we get a work-life balance?
We can all achieve it if we do some prioritising. Here’s a coaching exercise you can do to take stock and determine whether you have a good work-life balance.
Take a piece of paper and draw a large circle. Next to the circle, write these seven categories: work, partner, children, friends, health/fitness, personal development and spiritual. Include the ones applicable to you. Next to these categories write a percentage out of 100. This is the amount of time
spent on each category during a typical working week.
Divide your circle like a pizza into these categories, make the whole circle add up to 100 per cent – and be honest. Then sit back and have a look at your life and ask yourself these questions:
- Is my life balanced?
- Where is my life unbalanced? Note which categories stand out the most. List these.
- Beside each category write your ideal percentage – how much of your week you’d like to be spending on each one.
I understand that if you are the main breadwinner then you might think you need to spend a great deal of time working, as is the norm in Hong Kong. However, this time needs to be balanced
with family and health/fitness, otherwise you could have problems. If there is a significant
imbalance in your life, it could be causing you stress and this could lead to possible health issues later on. You’ll be of no use, financially or otherwise, to your family if you cannot work.
If you carry on living and working with such an imbalance in your life then you could be looking at a major illness in your 40s or 50s. Strokes and heart attacks are but two of the illnesses most often related to stress. Long-term or prolonged imbalance can cause significant health or relationship issues.
Significant imbalance between work and personal life could be affecting your relationships.
When you reach old age and start to think back on your life, will you have any regrets? Will one of them be, I wish I had worked more? No, it will all be about relationships: Have I had the best relationships I could have had with my partner, children and friends? If you haven’t, I guarantee your regrets will be about your relationships, along the lines of “I wish I’d spent more time with …”
The best thing is to be aware of any imbalance and set a plan to rectify it. Ask your friends, “Do you think I have balance in my life?”
Beside each category you’d like to see change, write yourself a plan of action in the form of steps needed to create an ideal balance. If you don’t know, get your partner, a friend or even a coach to help you create a plan.
One way to reduce the amount of time spent at work is by working smarter – working fewer hours and
being more productive.
Looking at your priorities in your work is the best start in creating a working-smarter mentality.
Also ask yourself when doing a task:“Is this the best use of my time right now?” If it’s not, then change what you’re doing and concentrate on your number one priority, then number two, and so on, so you’re on track to completing your tasks.
When setting priorities, think about what your objectives are: the rule of thumb is you should be working 80 per cent on one or more of those objectives and 20 per cent on other tasks important to your job. Interruptions should also be factored into the 20 per cent. Say “no” to requests that aren’t
important to you.
Adair Good is a member of the Hong Kong International Coaching Community (info@coachinghk.org)
