After a few months into this year’s journey with your goals, you probably consider time constraints one of the biggest impediments to pursuing your goals. You seek perfect yet elusive balance. The answer is not measured by a beam scale of justice but more closely resembles the ebb and flow in a lava lamp. Rather than setting a precise time allocation, our goals must be pursued harmoniously.
Threshold Question
Is the lack of time actually an improper use of time? Are you investing your time effectively or spending it inappropriately on activities that do not further your goals or are inconsistent with your values? In other words, are you inefficiently multitasking or watching too many Instagram reels?
While this blog is not about productivity hacks, techniques like those found here and here can “recover” time by improving your focus and efficiency.
The Futility of Balance
In an effort to establish a balance between time spent on our individual goals, we often establish rules requiring or restricting activity, such as being home every night by 6 pm for dinner or no-interruption work hours between 9 and 5.
Adherence to a perfect schedule is aspirational at best. You are about to leave the office and learn the spiral freezer sprocket broke, and you will be unable to complete production for your largest customer. While scrambling to solve your customer’s needs, you will miss that evening’s meatloaf and mashed potatoes.
Conversely, you will be minutes away from delivering a sales presentation to the huge prospect you have been chasing for three years and receive a call that your daughter was in a car wreck and is on her way to the hospital. You will sprint out of the office with barely a word to the prospect.
Integration?
More recently, thought leaders have introduced the concept of “integration,” which essentially recommends performing tasks at nontraditional times (e.g., working after dinner, grocery shopping in the afternoon) or alternating between work and family activities more frequently.
However, integration can be an unrealistic and ineffective having-it-all form of multitasking (beyond moving your clothes from the washer to the dryer during working hours). You are not fulfilling your values by letting your child color in the corner while on a Zoom call or connecting your laptop to your hotspot at your daughter’s basketball game.
Divided efforts meet the better-than-nothing standard but are nothing near your objectives. Be present wherever you are. Make sure the quantity is of high quality. Is the TV on during the no-cellphones-allowed family dinner? Is time with mom spent talking about precious family memories or silently watching Turner Classic Movies?
Being in Flow
Rather than balance or integration, acknowledge that the urgency surrounding a goal will rise and fall; the most disciplined must adjust to meet the need.
Your priorities and efforts are in constant flux like the bubbles in a lava lamp. The masses continuously change sizes and locations in the closed system representing finite time and space.
Rather than fighting it, accept and prepare for the flexibility you will inevitably be required to supply. Does this mean we should go with the flow and carried about by life’s current? No. While course deviations are unavoidable, we must establish priorities, respect them, and plan to act intentionally.
You go to your son’s T-ball game when you would prefer to finish the sales proposal. You maintain intensity during work’s slow season and build internal goodwill so you are comfortable leaving work to address the inevitable family crisis. You minimize “unavoidable” interruptions by finding a solution for the faulty carpool that pulls you away from work every week or getting on Instacart (not Gram) to eliminate a trip to the grocery store.
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Acknowledge that pursuing multiple priorities in your 24-hour closed system requires sporadic shifting; grant yourself grace, set good intentions, and take be-honest-with-yourself action.