Putting Your Life Before Your Work

You could probably attest to the fact that people are busier than ever. In fact you may even feel that way about yourself.

As you know, being so time-restricted can have some unfortunate consequences - Important things are neglected or deprioritized and daily expectations aren’t sustainable, basically acting as a ticking time-bomb that will inevitably go off and create fallouts within your physical health, relationships, and sanity.

If any of this sounds like you, the good news is you can still do something about it. Except for in extremely dire circumstances, nothing in life is permanent. There are always new balances to strike and new ways to design your life inputs so that it creates new outputs.

The first, most fundamental shift you can make to achieve more work-life balance is to establish your order of priorities. So many of us allow everyone else to determine the way we spend our time, causing us to be more reactive to the things around us rather than proactive about how we want them to be.

More specifically, the shift is to schedule your personal life before your work. The way you spend your time is a reflection of your priorities, so if you feel like you’re neglecting important things, it means that you need to reevaluate the way you structure your time.

If you feel resistant to this idea, isn’t it worth a try? Just try blocking off portions of your calendar and enforce it. You’ll find that this causes everything to shift to accommodate the new intention, and by necessity you’ll start to create efficiencies and stronger criteria around what actually deserves your time so that you can make it all work.

To put it another way - You are a person with a career, not a career with a personal life. Start getting the order right and you’ll find that not only that this is best for you, but it’s also best for your career. Subconscious transformation expert Jim Fortin has a quote that goes “the doing is only as good as the being doing the doing”. 

If you feel like you only have 50% of yourself to give because you’re burning the candle at both ends, then maybe it’s time to start adding more quality to your life. This will change everything from the inside out!