Work-Life Balance does not have to be a struggle. With these 5 Simple Steps to Mastering Work-Life Balance, you can achieve the balance you need and want NOW!
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5 Simple Steps to Mastering Work Life Balance NOW

5 Simple Steps to Mastering Work-Life Balance NOW. Work-Life balance does not have to be a struggle. Achieve the balance you want and need today.

 

Happy Friday! It’s the end of another week and a good time to reflect on how we are doing with our work life balance. Work life balance can be so elusive, can’t it? Just when we think our work life is going well, something in our personal life tanks. Or vice versa. Why is it so hard to achieve a good balance between our professional and personal lives? Between our dream life goals and reality?

When I worked full-time outside the home as an accountant and auditor, I craved more time with my family. Now that I’m a stay-at-home mom, my dream is to earn income from home doing something I love. I want a balance. I need that balance. And I have a feeling you want and need that balance too. 

Now I don’t have a crystal ball or the perfect answer but I’ve struggled with achieving work-life balance for the last 15 years since I became a mom. I’ve done a lot of reading and reflecting on planning to achieve my dream life and even more trial and error over the years to come up with these 5 Simple Steps and Resources to Mastering Work Life Balance NOW that I’m sharing with you today.

 

Note: This post contains affiliate links as indicated by an asterisk. Purchases from these links provides a small commission to me at no extra cost to you. 

 

1. Pinpoint Your Passion Roadmap

  
One thing I LOVED about the Passion Planner I am using this year was the exercise to complete the Passion Roadmap. The Roadmap doesn’t ask us what we felt like we needed to accomplish to be a good parent, spouse, employee, citizen or friend.

It simply asks us “If you could BE anything, DO anything, or HAVE anything, what would it be?” 

We all have plenty of things we know we need to do for our work, but what are the things you want to do for a happy LIFE? At the end of the day, what makes you say as in the wise words of my youngest son “This was the best day ever!”

As Lisa Sugar of Popsugar says in her book Power Your Happy: Work Hard, Play Nice & Build Your Dream Life*:

I firmly believe that what you find yourself doing in your spare time is the passion you should pursue. Don’t decide what you want to do with your life; let your life tell you what your path is.

What do you spend your spare time doing? What is it you want to do? Let’s find a way to sneak more time in your day for your passions. 

 

The Passion Planner Roadmap helps identify what your dream life looks like and what steps you need to take to achieve it.
 

As you can see from my Passion Roadmap, I have a bunch of bucket list lifetime goals. Angelia Trinidad, the Passion Planner CEO, told us to write down anything we wanted and so I did..including my wildest dream kind of goals like traveling to exotic places, living at the beach and writing a book!

What are your wildest dream kind of goals? What are your passions to lead your dream life? What happy things do you need to balance out all that work you do? If you need help finding your passion, check out my post here with 3 tips for finding your passion.  

Recommended Resource: Find the perfect planner for your needs in my Ultimate Planner Comparison including the Passion Planner shown above.

 

2. Focus on a Chosen Few

We want to do all the things and please all the people but we just can’t do it all. Think about the different roles you play and pick one goal related to each role that you want to pursue for the year.

My roles and the dream life goals I am focusing on are:
* Homemaker – to make our home a dream home
* Mom & Wife – help kids achieve their dreams and grow in love and respect everyday with my Superhubby
* Patient – to take better care of myself 
* Blogger/Work from Home Business Owner – to inspire busy moms and chronic illness patients to celebrate life & thrive with (or without) chronic illness.

What are your biggest roles? What is one goal you want to accomplish for each role this year?

Recommended Resource: The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey that will help you define your roles and set your goals

 

3. Be Intentional With Your Time and Energy

When you are presented with a new opportunity or demand, think about whether it fits in to one of your dream life goals. If it doesn’t fit, just say NO! 

My energy is limited and rather unpredictable due to Rheumatoid Arthritis and though it’s my biggest struggle, I have to focus and be intentional with how I spend my time when I’m feeling well. Make a careful, conscious, intentional choice whether you are fighting the biggest fire of the day, working towards your goals or pursuing your passion. We want no regrets for the decisions we’ve made. 

What can you say NO to to make more time for things you want to do? 

Recommended Resource: Say Goodbye to Survival Mode by Crystal Paine who talks a lot about being intentional with your time.

 

4. Track How You Spend Your Time

How we plan to spend our time can be very different from how we actually spent our time, especially when kids or chronic illness are involved.  You don’t need a fancy system unless you want one and it only takes a few minutes to jot down in a notebook or planner what you did for which role and goal in your life.

I track how I spend my time in each of my roles in my Passion Planner each week. Each role has a different color associated with it. At the end of the day or week when I color everything in, I have an easy to read visual of how I split my time between my roles. I can easily tell if I had a good work-life balance or if my time was spent more heavily in one role and neglecting the others. It also tells me how I can improve for next week.  

The Passion Planner is a great gift to give mom who works from home. With plenty of space to write home, family and work to do lists, weekly focus and good things that happened, mom is sure to love this planner and how it helps her stay focused and motivated to achieve her goals for her family and work.

In this week, I clearly spent most of my time on family (orange), did pretty well sneaking in some work/blogging time (teal) but hardly made any time for myself besides sleeping and eating lunch (purple) or doing housework or decluttering (yellow). 

How is your time being spent? Are you spending time on the things that are important to you? On the want to dos? Or on the must do’s?

 

5. Reflect on How to Improve

In Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity*, author David Allen suggests doing a weekly review where you reflect on what went well, what didn’t and how to improve from there. This step is important for getting back into focus what you want to work on so you can fit that into your schedule with the things you need to work on next week.

Don’t lose hope, don’t get overwhelmed, don’t regret the choices you’ve already made. Just take a minute to reflect on how your work life balance was and how you can do better next week. 

How can you make more time next week for the things you want to do? 

 

Work life balance doesn’t have to be a struggle. By taking it step by step and figuring out what a good balance looks like to you, being intentional with your time, tracking how you spent your time and reflecting on how to improve your work life balance, you can achieve the elusive work life balance you so desire. For the sake of yourself, your family, your career and your health, work life balance is a worthwhile goal to achieve. 

 

Exclusive Free Resources to Achieve Your Dream Life

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How are YOUR Grades? Plus 5 Epic FREE Resources to be a Successful Blogger NOW!

 

Pin for Later 

Work-Life Balance does not have to be a struggle. With these 5 Simple Steps to Mastering Work-Life Balance, you can achieve the balance you need and want NOW!

 

What helps you achieve work life balance? Let’s collaborate and share tips with each other so we can achieve the work life balance we dream of! Be sure to drop me a line if you have any questions or if you want to chat about pursuing your goals, I’d love to hear from you!

 

29 Comments

  1. Great post as usual, Tanya! I do a good job with planning, and I track how I am doing against my goals on an Excel spreadsheet, but I do like your color-coding – lets you see things at a glance.

    Sue

  2. I just got a full time job along with blogging and a part time job. BUSY. These tips were amazing, I need to learn how to track my spending!

  3. You always have such wonderful tips and information. I’m always in awe of your planning skills. I need more planning and balance, it’s certainly something I hope to get better at.
    Thank you for sharing!
    XOOX

  4. I am loving your bullet journal!!11 I know I would be so much more productive if I was more intentional with my time!

  5. It’s really important that we are passionate about what we, otherwise we’re just going to feel stuck everyday until we decide to quit. I think these are beautiful steps to take if you want to achieve balance.

  6. I definitely needed to read this! My life at the moment is so chaotic that I have no balance what so ever. I will be incorporating your tips into my day to day.

  7. I agree with all of this! Work /life balance is always something I seem to be “working” on. Im a homeschooling mom so I’m busy what seems like 24/7/365 and it’s tough to manage all that’s on my plate at times. I love how you pointed out to question whether tasks fit into my dream life plan and if it doesn’t to just say no! I’ve been practicing that… and it seems to keep things a bit simpler for me. Thank you for sharing these life tips. I like knowing that I’m not alone in my daily struggles and I love that other women are finding ways to manage life in a healthy way so we could live life fully and enjoy all it has to offer! We all deserve that.

  8. As much as l love working from home, I do notice that I have to be more conscious of separating my personal time from my work time. Otherwise they can blend together and I don’t get enjoy my life like I should.

  9. These are some great tips. I am a work at home blogger so I sometimes need to figure out this whole work/home balance thing. sometimes it crosses, and I need to figure it out!

  10. I’ve never heard of a passion planner. Very cool idea. Seeing your roadmap was quite impressive! I really like the idea of thinking through how you’re spending your time – and making sure it aligns with your priorities.

  11. Balancing work and home is quite hard for me, I am either engulfed in my work or just want to do nothing and stay in bed all day watching Netflix. Great post will definitely help 🙂

  12. What wonderful tips! I agree that striking a work-life balance can be difficult, especially if you are living paycheck to paycheck or changing from a day job to a passion career. These are really helpful insights!

  13. I need some balance in my life! I have been finding it to be more of a struggle working from home than I did working outside of the home. While I love it, I need to really focus myself.

  14. You make such great and intricate notes which may be why you are so organized. I have found it hard to balance work life balance because sometimes the work just keeps coming.

  15. These are all great tips! A work life balance is very important. Regardless if you have family or single. You have to make sure you are enjoying life and spending time for YOU or your loved ones.

  16. I have never heard of the passion planner! Sounds awesome. These are such great steps. I really need to plot out where I want to be. It’s hard to do sometimes.

  17. Balancing work at home can be tricky. I love that my daughter can see that she has choices in the way she works. Scheduling is key so that I am done with work before my family gets home. (my children are grown)

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