Finding Balance in Your Busy Schedule

Do you ever feel like you spend your life juggling? Work, keeping the house in order, keeping the kids functioning, homework, health, and so on. It seems all you can do to satisfy all the demands in life is just juggling – and this makes life exhausting – so how do you deal with this? Most of us are juggling 4 types of balls: work, family, health, and friends. So how do you decide which ball MUST stay in the air and which ball can be dropped without the entire thing falling apart causing mass devastation? The answer is what can give you sanity and what you can keep in the air that might give you value and opportunities. Here are the steps to successful juggling:

Lesson #1: Identify which type of balls you are juggling – there are 2 types of balls – crystal balls and rubber balls. It is important to decide which one you can drop because if you drop a rubber ball, what is it going to do – bounce right? And you can just add it back into the juggling mix at a later time. However, if you drop a crystal ball, well, not only is it going to shatter into a million pieces but it’s also going to take a lot of time and attention to put this back into the mix, so it's better to keep all the crystal balls in the air. Knowing the difference will help manage your priorities- ask yourself which are crystal balls and which are rubber balls.

Lesson #2: Identify which balls can turn from rubber to crystal and back again. Sometimes we can shift certain priorities to the back burner without them shattering into a million pieces, other times, they need to be treated very carefully and be front and center above all else. Think about when you were in school, typically you had homework, readings, and other things to keep up on – so school at this time was a rubber ball. But then came exam time when all of your efforts, thoughts, and every second of every day went into school. During this time, school became a crystal ball because if you didn’t focus on studying, everything was going to fall apart and all those months of keeping up were for nothing. Identifying which balls change their state is important as well.

Summary: Examine the 4 areas of your life and determine which areas are CURRENTLY crystal and which are rubber. Which one, if not attended to right now will have long-term negative consequences. It’s important to reassess this regularly because once again this can change. After the most urgent and important is attended to and cools down, perhaps it can take a back burner to others, or perhaps this one is always going to be a crystal ball that needs to be handled with the utmost care. Doing this can help keep you laser-focused on what matters now and this is where you should keep your focus and attention.