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Friday, March 7, 2008

Balance in Life

My husband often asks me to balance my time. To prove his point he showed me an article about the value of balance. According to that article, most of our troubles are due to imbalances, to which my husband strongly agrees.

We should divide our day in such a way we can balance work, family time, socializing, exercise, spiritual time, and fun time. If a person works eight hours a day, drives half an hour each way to work, breaks at lunch for an hour, exercises for an hour, and sleeps seven hours, this adds up to a total of eighteen hours. I assume the remaining six hours are used for family time, fun, socializing and spiritual time.

I am not sure in which category I can fit cooking, dinner and dishwashing time. Reading should go under the hour or two of fun time. And what about writing?

I am writing full time-- or to be more accurate I sit in front of my computer full time. I can manage an hour to exercise or walk every day, a couple of hours to visit my mother in assisted living. I can cook twice a week and freeze, socialize two or three times a week. I don’t know if this is a balanced life. Considering there is so much more I want to do, I’m still faced with the same problem of balancing my time.

I think balancing one’s time is wonderful. In theory. Unfortunately I don’t believe you can be successful while dividing your time in multiple activities. I have always learned that to be successful you ought to give your main goal your 101%.

Yet some people manage to multitask and be successful at everything they do. If you are one of these fortunate people, how do you do it?

8 comments:

Brynn Paulin said...

Balance? What's that. Thanks for the reality check.

Mona Risk said...

My husband insists on posting his comment:

I can tell you how. Work 8 hrs, exercse 1.5 HRS, lunch with me 1.5 hr, see mom 1.5 HRS, cook, dinner 1.5 hrs, sleep 8 hrs. That is a total 21 hrs. You have 3 hrs left per day for fun with me. Then there is vacation, remember??
LOVE , SAM

Phoenix said...

Nah. Just trying to balance stuff would stress me out.

Molly Daniels said...

Ha ha...I know the days I'm out of balance...hubby starts making threats to unplug the computer and throw it out!

Teri Thackston said...

Hi, Mona,
I blogged about this recently and got a lot of great comments. It is tough to do for everyone. I mean, there are only 24 hours in a day and its the writing that gets pushed aside first when that time runs out. It's very frustrating.

Mona Risk said...

Brynn, I'm glad I'm not the only unable to balance my time. As Kelly said, trying to balance my life makes me stressful.

I'm like you Molly and Thea. But now I'll relax knowing I have sisters in imbalance. LOL

Anny Cook said...

I plan to accomplish absolutely nothing for three days a week. Those are the days that I use bits of time to chat, post, do research, in the midst of the chaos of regular life. The other four days I write. Then if I am able to write more, that's a bonus. I don't plan which days will be non-productive days... I just accept it when it happens.

Unknown said...

My time is my own as I do what I please with it. Freedom - you can't beat it