If you want to achieve work and life balance, it is paramount that you understand yourself including knowing the things that really important to you in life.What follows from that is managing time based upon importances.The essance of work life balance is

• Knowing your values and remaining true to them
• Making progress toward achieving your life goals
• Being good at time management

Your Values and Achieving Work and Life Balance

Here is a definition of values: it is what you consider to be important. They vary from person to person. We organize our values in a pecking order according to how important they are to us. The seniority we give to our values has an impact on the decisions we make.

Many indivuals have a sense of their hiercharchy of values, but it is just beyond their conscious awareness. I occasionally run into people who have done courses that have help them to develop their values hierarchy. You have to understand your hierarchy of values if you want to balance your work and life.

In my work as a coach, I got into trouble a few times by assuming that I knew the values of the person I was working with. I had the following experience that illustrates this point. My role involved coaching of a top executive in a large multinational company.

1. He was working 90 hours per week
2. He worked from 5AM til 8PM Monday through Friday
3. He worked an additional 15 hours every weekend
4. He hadn’t taken a vacation in the last year

My work with him was about helping him to lower the amount of time he was spending on work. Before I started the coaching, I thought to myself

• He is a top executive in a company that has operations in more than 20 countries
• People working at that level in large companies invariably are working at least 60 hours in a week
• expect that he wants to reduce his hours to around 60 a week

We got to talking. He wanted to reduce his working hours to just 75 hours a week. He revealed that his wife had the expectation that he would put in long hours between Monday to Friday, as her father had been a senior executive with that company and had worked very long hours as well. It was acceptable for him to to begin work at 5AM and finish at 8PM on weekdays. It was unacceptable for him to work weekends and unacceptable that he hadnt taken a vacation.

Those were the criteria he had for work and life balance.

Your Personal Goals and Achieving Work and Life Balance

Your time management skills are critical to achieving work life balance. To manage time, goals must first be identified and then there must be an intent to pursue them.You cannot manage your time if you do not know

1. What goals do you want to achieve? (your goals
2. How close are you now to achieving each goal?
3. What do you need to do to reach each goal? (plans)

The secret to time management is having these goals and focusing on them all the time. To achieve work life balance, you need to have the following

• A vision of what work should be like
• A vision of what life should be like
• Goals that, when achieved, will bring the work vision into being
• Goals that, when achieved, will bring the life vision into being
• A plan for the achievement of each goal
• The ability to focus on your goals
• The ability to spend the maximum amount of your time doing actions that will achieve those goals

Your Ability To Manage Time and Achieving Work and Life Balance

If you want to manage your time well, you must identify goals and focus your attention on achieving them. Your achievement of work and life balance is dependent on your skill in connection with being able to remain focussed on named goals and achieving them.

Distractions abound. They can arrive in the form of an email, a phone call, an ad, a tv program, a visitor, those around us, or a meeting – to name a few sources. They present options, which if followed, will consume your time.

To manage your time well, you have to be able to appraise the various opportunities that arise and decide whether or not to persue them. Each option that presents itself can

• help you to attain your outcome, or
• hinder you in attaining your outcome

To be effective at managing your time, you must be selective about the opportunities that you pursue and avoid based upon there relevance to your goal attainment. As your achievement of the right work and life balance for you is so dependent on your ability to manage time, I want to share the following quote with you

“Time is the coin of your life. It is the only coin you have, and only you can determine how it will be spent. Be careful lest you let other people spend it for you.” – Carl Sandburg

Achieving the right balance of work and life is not a simple thing to do. I know this because I have coached more than 300 senior executives on this matter. It requires some knowledge and skills that you probably do not have as yet and it requires that you to do some personal development work on yourself and what you want from life. If you really want work life balance, you will achieve it. You will need ongoing guidance and support to achieve it. You can obtain the guidance and support you will need from work and life balance. The author of this material has received The Order Of Merit from the President of the United States.