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Category Archive: Work Life Integration

How To Know What's Important: Calendars and Checkbooks

Posted by on June 18, 2017

We all want to accomplish the things that are really important in life and learn the discipline to walk away from everything else. Most of us have not taken the time to write down specific goals in a life plan that involves everything personal, family, faith, friends and our professional lives. Best practice Living Forward by Michael Hyatt.

So how do we know if we are just filling our schedules with things to do without any serious evaluation or if those are the things that should even be done at all? We don’t want to get to the end of our lives and look back realizing that a lot of our time was totally wasted on things that don’t really matter.

A great place to start is to evaluate how we are spending our time and our money. Calendars can tell us a lot about our core values and priorities because they reflect the choices we are making. No doubt some of our time is not our own to schedule but how we are spending a large percentage of it reflects what is really a priority and what is not.

Are you making time for the people and relationships that you care about the most or are they getting the leftovers at best? If you really want to know, take the time to track how you are spending your time for at least a month. You will be amazed how much of it is scheduled based on what appears to be urgent at the time but in the end is not really important at all.

The next big indicator of what is a priority in our lives is to look at how we are spending our finances. If we are living beyond our means and accumulating unnecessary debt then we have a major character problem that must be addressed.

More stress is brought into marriage by this one area than almost anything else. The only solution is again to write down a budget that includes all of your expenses and then have the discipline to post all your transactions and make necessary adjustments to live within your income.

You may think this sounds like way too much work to me and I am already busy enough. Trust me you are already using calendars and checkbooks anyway but you may not be gaining any of the benefits of leading your life instead of just letting it happen.

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How To Stop Taking Work Stress Out On Your Family

Posted by on June 14, 2017

By the very nature of our work we have to be on almost all of the time. We put up with a lot of drama and the productivity demands alone build up tremendous stress. If we don’t develop habits that allow us to come home with some emotional margin, we will take all of that frustration out on the people who matter most. Amy Morin has two great proven strategies:

“Do you ever come home irritable because you had a rough day at the office? Do you take out your frustrations from work on your family? If so, you’re not alone. It’s an issue I address in my therapy office often. I hear from parents who are disappointed in themselves for yelling at their children. I also hear from spouses who are tired of walking on eggshells in an effort to avoid becoming the undeserving target of an entire days’ worth of frustration and anger.”

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How To Make Time For What Matters Most

Posted by on May 15, 2017

The skill sets involved in personal productivity will ensure that you can get more things done faster. However, they can not tell you if those things should be done at all. Everyone really needs to develop a life plan that defines the major priorities in their life. Michael Hyatt’s Living Forward is an excellent tool. This post by Sherry Swift is also helpful:

“So many of us suffer from the unrealistic, anxiety-based feeling that “there is never enough time.” This feeling usually comes from living a distracted life — one that is constantly interrupted by something noisy and new. As a result of this lifestyle, we are often left feeling disjointed, incomplete and unsuccessful.”

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How To Find Margin For Your Total Life

Posted by on March 24, 2017

If there has ever been a day when the demands of work and home have been greater I am not aware of it. The sheer pace of life today leaves us emotionally and physically worn out and feeling empty at the end of most days.

Technology keeps us connected all the time and people in the workplace culture almost demand that we stay available 24-7. Our families are all running on the same high speed treadmill that produces stress in every area of our lives.

There are several key principles that must be in place if you want to create margin for the people and priorities that you care about the most:

Lead Yourself First—it is impossible to successfully help lead other people at work or in the home if you are not able to accomplish what is most important in your own life. You should set specific goals in the areas of health, personal development and faith with the necessary time allotment to make sure they get done.
Prioritize Your Family Next—at the end of your life it will not matter how much professional success you have had if you consistently neglected your role as a spouse and parent. There are no guarantees that time alone will produce a great marriage and character driven children but without it there is a high probability that both areas could fail.
Choose Right Career—most organizations are looking for people who will perform and improve their bottom line. However there is a growing awareness that if you want to attract and keep the best people you have to give some deference to work-life balance. The key is you have to be outstanding at what you do and you have to be in a culture that will reward that effort by giving you more time off and not more projects to accomplish.
Develop Life Plan—it never ceases to amaze me that some of the most effective leaders in the corporate arena do not practice any of the leadership disciplines that made them successful in their home and personal life. The can lead multi-million dollar projects from start to finish at work but not take more than 30 minutes to plan the annual family vacation.

When you develop a total life plan with goals and strategies for everything personal, private and public you just assumed the C.E.O. leadership role for your whole life. You will never have a more important job.

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9 Great Paradoxes Of Our Time

Posted by on March 22, 2017

In a day when our calendars are beyond full and yet our lives seem to be empty something has gone wrong. We in many cases have assumed because we are busy the things we are doing must be important.

We clearly have shifted the focus from being as a person to doing and what we are able to accomplish. Technology has helped us in many cases simply to do the wrong things faster.

The great paradoxes of our time have been summed up well by the Dalai Lama:

“We have more conveniences, but less time.

We have more degrees, but less sense…more knowledge but less judgment.

More experts, but more problems.

More medicines, but less healthiness.

We have been all the way to the moon and back but have trouble crossing the street to meet the new neighbor.

We build more computers to hold more information that produce more copies than ever before, but have less communication.

We have become long on quantity, but short on quality.

These are the times of fast foods but weak digestion.

It is a time when there is much in the window but nothing in the room.”

For many of us we have been living the script for our lives that were given to us by someone else; parents, peers, friends or the culture we live in. The time has come for us to have the courage to say no and the passion to write our own.

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The Importance Of Life Beyond Work

Posted by on March 15, 2017

When I start a coaching relationship we normally focus in on some area for professional improvement at work. This leads to topics from personal productivity to organizational strategy. However, without exception at some point we transition to the personal. The reason why is we bring home to work everyday and we must make it more of a priority. This HBR post has some great insight:

We spend most of our adult waking hours working. Half of Americans continue to work when they reach their mid-sixties, and, according to a 2015 Gallup survey, full-time American employees work an average of 47 hours a week. If you’re keeping track at home, that’s six days’ worth of hours packed into five. Moreover, many of us today expand the role of work beyond just earning a living and expect our careers to provide opportunities for personal growth and fulfillment.

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Families Deserve Priority Not Leftovers

Posted by on February 17, 2017

I have never known a great leader who did not know how to establish goals, develop plans, execute priorities and finally evaluate success in their career. Every day they proactively plan ahead and solve problems to everyone can be successful.

However, tragically for most people that is exactly what happens to them in their personal lives. They say this part is ultimately the most important but they never take the time to write down what they want their legacy to be for the people that matter the most.

Because the personal does not get the priority of the professional the family usually ends up with the leftovers. Leftover time, passion, affection and energy.

I have know people who can make million dollar decisions at work without blinking but by the time they get home they do not have enough emotional energy to decide if they want hamburgers or soup for dinner. They have been nice to other people all day, co-workers, suppliers and customers only to come home and be so fried they have to retreat to the T.V. because they have nothing left for spouse or children.

Someone has well said that the person who cannot see the ultimate always becomes a slave to the immediate. Meaningful relationships with family and bottom line professional results are not mutually exclusive but you must be willing to pay personal leadership price to have both.

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Corporate Shepherd

Posted by on February 6, 2017

There are many leaders today that want to move beyond just making a profit to really making a difference. They want to be successful and that’s great but they also want the significance that only comes from adding value to other people.

When leadership is approached from a Christian perspective a new model starts to develop where the leader becomes more of a shepherd to their people than a boss to their employees. They do care about performance and productivity but they also feel responsible for developing alignment around core values and creating the right culture for work-life balance for their people.

They also see life beyond the immediate pressures of planning, project management, staffing, goal setting and execution. The legacy they want to create for their life and organization includes eternal metrics that must be included when talking about the ultimate bottom line.

The clear plan for every Christian is to use your professional life as a platform for ministry because we are all in full time Christian service. Our lives should no longer be seen as segmented into faith, family, friends, recreation and entertainment but become totally integrated into being one life on mission for God. The various roles that we fulfill are no longer competing with each other but complimenting the calling God has for our lives.

In the end there is only one performance review that really matters. The evaluation criteria is simple, How faithful were you with all that I entrusted to your care? Thinking about that moment should overwhelm us with gratitude and give us a renewed sense of passion to hear well done my good and faithful servant.

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Developing A Life Plan

Posted by on January 13, 2017

All of us at some point in time finally ask ourselves if we are living out the script someone else gave us or is it really the life we want. There are so many outside factors: parents, friends, culture and circumstances that drive us toward an uncertain destination. Developing a Life Plan starts with a healthy self-awareness that helps you discover who you are and what you want out of life. This HBR post tells great story:

“Tina was at a crossroads. Her daughter had recently left for college, and her husband had his own pursuits. And although she’d once enjoyed banking, she now bore little interest in her work. For some time, she had been asking herself whether she should quit. But what would her colleagues and bosses think of her?”

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Change Your Calendar, Change Your Life

Posted by on December 9, 2016

There are two indicators that don’t lie about what our true priorities are in life, calendars and checkbooks. We have a tremendous amount of leadership responsibility over both areas. Many times our schedules are driven by others but for most of us we waste a tremendous amount of time doing the wrong things. This post by Shani Harmon was spot on:

“Many people treat their calendar the same way – as a picture of what is often a very sad reality. Days either booked back-to-back with meetings or hacked into pieces by a scattering of appointments throughout. No time reserved for mental breaks, much less uninterrupted stretches for thinking and creating.”

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