We need to be thoughtful about how we invest our time to truly create work-life balance…
If I were to ask you how you are investing your money, you would likely have a relatively standard answer. You would own some growth stocks, perhaps some value stocks, perhaps some bonds, and each would be in your portfolio in a certain percentage for a reason.
The results of having this portfolio is that you should get a good return on your investment.
If I were to ask you how you are investing your time, however, the answer is likely less straightforward. For most of us, we invest our time in work first and everything else in a bit of a random fashion thereafter… and this is why work-life balance remains elusive.
Consider the following simple exercise. Ask yourself in an average week how much time you spend in each of the following categories:
At work (either in the office or at home):
With your spouse (1 on 1):
With your kids:
With (or on the phone with) your good friends/relatives:
Doing something that you enjoy:
Doing something charitable:
Relaxing with a book, meditating or doing something otherwise restorative:
Watching TV:
Getting exercise:
In the interest of full disclosure, here are what I would say are my rough numbers today…
Now, what should be painfully obvious in looking at this is that there are some places where I may want to reallocate time from one place to another.
Let’s just assume my work hours are fixed, since those aren’t readily changed for many of us.
What jumps off the page (to me at least) is that I’m not spending enough alone time with my wife and I’m pretty much neglecting my good friends. This is happening, crazily enough, so that I can watch 7 hours of TV a week.
Now 7 hours of TV is only an hour a day, so it isn’t a huge number, but it is when you consider that I’m investing about 3 times as much time in TV as I am spending on the most important relationships in my life (well, other than my kids).
The other thing that is telling is that I’m only spending an hour and a half exercising during the week (30 minutes, 3 times a week). –Although admittedly, this number was zero for years and years, so I feel pretty good about it.
Finally, you can tell that I’m not spending very much time at all on the things I really enjoy doing… primarily sailing. –That will change next week with the start of our summer racing season, guaranteeing around 4 hours per week for the next 10 weeks, but otherwise sailing gets pushed to the side in favor of children and work.
The flip side of this is what I have prioritized. Clearly it is work and my kids. –I certainly take pride in the time I spend with my kids both during the week and on weekends.
In fact, both my wife and I do, so while we get quite a bit of family time, which we prioritize, we get precious little time together or for the other things in life. –Part of the tradeoff of being a parent.
What to do about it and how to find work-life balance
The point of this exercise, and in fact this whole article, is to drive awareness. Most of us are vaguely aware that we are not spending our time in the optimal way but we have never taken the time to actually chart how we spend our time and do something about it.
When I ask my clients what matters most to them, they almost always say family first, income second and free time third. When you look at how they spend their time, work tends to come first.
This is absolutely understandable and probably true for the vast majority of people. The question becomes what do you do with the time that is left over? Are you strategic about how you spend that time or do you allow inertia to pull you in a certain direction?
The key to spending your time differently is developing new habits. Weekly date nights, prioritizing the thing you love doing one night a week, scheduling time for productive resting (and hiding the remote control).
Changing your behavior and building new habits isn’t easy. In fact, it may be one of the toughest things to do… however, you can’t be surprised by the results you get if you don’t invest your time in the places that have the most meaning for you.
As I mention in the article Why even successful people need career coaches, I heard a very common theme among ultra successful (i.e. $100M+ net worth) executives while at Harvard Business School, which was they had invested everything in work and entered their 60s divorced with little relationship with their kids and with few meaningful friendships.
It’s all a function of investing everything in one aspect of life and very little in the others. Yet, there are people who do manage to have it all. The secret is that the quality of the time you spend in various areas of your life is more important than the quality. (See Executive Coaching: Work-life balance and time for yourself)
Said differently, an hour of amazing, fully engaged time with your child is worth far more than three hours of you watching him play while looking at your iPhone. The key is ensuring that you do allocate enough time to the things that matter, that you maximize the quality of that time, and that you build habits into your schedule so that you make these investments strategically.
Coming back to the way I personally spend my time, I view this as a work in progress. I’ve started shifting my time, building habits around them and I’m experiencing results… but there is still a long way to go for me to get the way I spend my time and the quality of that time where I want it.
In other words, I haven’t achieved my version of work-life balance yet, but I’m getting closer and closer to it.
If you have questions about executive coaching in San Diego and beyond, please let me know.