Читать книгу Your 168 - Harry M. Kraemer Jr. - Страница 13

To live a values-based life, you need to know what your values are. Then, you make a sincere and ongoing effort to live your life so that what you do and how you act reflect those values. Sounds pretty straightforward, doesn't it? But notice I said, “sincere and ongoing effort.” The reality is no matter how dedicated you are to living a values-based life, you're always a work in progress. Nobody gets it right all the time. In my more than 40 years of pursuing a values-based life, I'm constantly recalibrating how to allocate my 168 hours each week to reflect my values and what I believe is most important in my life. That's the only way I know of to pursue life balance.

Life balance, as I explained in the introduction, doesn't mean work-life balance—a concept that always confused me because it seems to indicate a choice between working and living. Our lives are multifaceted. Many of us devote a great deal of time to work—let's hope, doing work we find meaningful and satisfying. But there is more to our lives than work. We have other priorities that might include family, friends, and/or others within our community. We have leisure activities that bring enjoyment and enrich our lives. We want to be healthy and pursue some kind of exercise. Spirituality may be important, and maybe we want to make a positive impact in the community or even globally.

Don't mistake life balance for time management. The primary goal here is not to become incredibly efficient with your time, although that might be one of the benefits of engaging in this process. The primary goal is life balance. It comes down to the life buckets I discussed in the introduction, the specific areas into which we allocate our time, attention, and effort. By focusing on our chosen life buckets, we can pursue life balance—with the caveat that we won't be in balance all the time. Rather, we'll be constantly recalibrating and rebalancing.

The only way to pursue life balance is by becoming self-aware through self-reflection. Your commitment to living your life aligned with your values won't always be easy. Countless demands, distractions, and unexpected challenges will get in the way. But the payoff for engaging in the pursuit of life balance is to have more joy, satisfaction, purpose, and meaning, with a lot less worry, fear, anxiety, pressure, and stress.