the hundred dollar business

I’ve been spending a lot of time lately working on this elusive thing called work-life balance. I sat down about a week ago and prioritized the current things I’m involved with, and then evaluated where I’d been investing my time & energy.

Not surprisingly, there was a lot of incongruence. Something I’d know, but hadn’t seen such quantitative evidence of. In general terms, it looked something like this:

Important
Nutrition, sleep, relaxing, friends, work, finances, MBA app, and family (not in that particular order).

Good
Household stuff, fun, cleaning, civic/community participation.

Extra
Hundred Dollar Business projects, cool technology, working overtime, organizing stuff, blogging, miscellaneous.

Low Priority
More of the same from “Extra” list.

Not Crucial
Training for a marathon.

Of course, there are other things on the radar, but these are the main ones. What is interesting is that almost everything from the “Important” and “Good” lists have been sliding by for quite a few months, and most of my energy has been going towards the “extra” and “low priority” categories.

And, lately I was considering prepping for Rexburg’s Dam Marathon coming up in June. But when I see everything laid out according to priorities, & that a marathon is at the bottom of the barrel for what I’m most interested in accomplishing currently, it simply doesn’t make the cut.

The last four weeks I’ve cut back extremely on blogging, work (beyond the 40 hours of my day job), & technology, & have put The Hundred Dollar Business on hold indefinitely.

(That doesn’t mean forever, just that it’s on hold until my priorities are being successfully balanced as they need to be & I can re-integrate The HDB back in).

There are a couple of things that have been particularly helpful:

• Constantly asking myself if what I’m doing is what I really need to be doing at that time.
• I don’t open up my laptop computer in the morning until I’m actually at my office.
• Getting 8+ hours of sleep most nights.
• Concentrating on fulfilling my primary responsibilities first (taking care of myself, doing a great job at my day job, and the miscellanea of being a responsible adult) and then applying spare time to the needs of the day.
• Recognizing that if I’m not taking care of the basics, I really don’t have any “free time” to be working on anything else.

It’s so cliched, but I think it’s crucial to recognize what your priorities are, and to take responsibility for the success of your life & your pursuits by making the critical choices necessary to stay on track.

Right now, it’s 12:10 am– which means my current priority is to stop blogging & get some sleep. So I’ll end by asking, which work-life balance tricks have you found to be particularly useful for you?