If you are an ambitious high achiever type of woman, then you have probably experienced first hand how hard it can be to try balancing out your personal relationships with your work. As billionaire women enthusiasts, we can learn a lot by taking a few steps back and noticing what other women and men have learned about the fragile balance of work and life. After all, we don’t need to balance our work and personal lives all by our lonesome, there are others out there to help us do this the right way.

Photo and caption by Ron Marshall

As Dave Navarro highlighted in his post about making the time for your family and your life, time is always ticking and there are moments that we can never truly recapture. Moments like your child’s first day at school, their theater performances, sports games and competitions, your spouse’s anniversary, your parents’ wedding anniversary and so on. From my observations, men tend to be more involved in their work and not have time to focus on some of these types of activities as much as women. However there are definitely times when a woman might decide that getting some work done and calling the babysitter to watch over her kids for the evening is a good choice. Indeed these situations are hard to judge on the spot, but if you come up with a plan for yourself with guidelines ahead of time, you won’t feel so guilty about your decisions.

Work Life Balance Exercise

Here is a quick activity that you can do that will relieve all of your work/life balance stress, if you put it in practice.

1. Write down what activities and events take precedence over your daily home life routine. For example if there is a business meeting with clients that comes up and you are asked to be present, decide whether or not this is more important than going home and spending time with your family. You might decide that these meetings are only important if you are going after a promotion more aggressively, or if you feel that the clients need more attention to make a deal. On the other hand you might decide that company events such as dinners and galas take precedence only if you do not have any engagements with your children or spouse. For example you would choose to go to a school play over a company dinner, or vise versa. There are no wrong choices here, as long as you make them ahead of time and stick to them. Of course after working with these decisions for awhile, you should review your decisions and see if you need to make any adjustments based on your new experiences.
2. Write down what home life activities and events take precedence over work. These might be things like taking your children to the dentist, doctor, or hospital. Or things like your children’s school activities, parent-teacher night, your spouse’s night to make dinner, etc. These will vary wildly based on who you are, what type of a family you have and what your priorities are.
3. If you choose to do so, you can let you boss know about this new framework that you have put in place for yourself. It will help you stick to your commitments and if you feel guilty about skipping out on a business breakfast to bring your kids to school, your boss and coworkers will understand and even encourage you to stick to your commitment.
4. Every few months, take the time to review the priorities that you’ve set in place and see how they are working for you. If they aren’t, then make the adjustments necessary. I recommend that you write everything down on paper or in a document on your computer. It is much easier to refer to something that is written down than to try to remember why you decided to place priority on working overtime instead of on cleaning the house, a few months down the line.

I am personally putting this system into practice in my daily life and already I am seeing some good results. I do not yet have any children of my own, but I am prioritizing time spent with my parents, my grandparents and my partner in order to feel good about both my work and my life. I really think that once you are clear about your expectations for yourself, you will feel great making those quick work/life balance decisions and sticking to them. Not to mention being able to relax knowing that you are not missing any of the important moments in your family member’s lives, because we all know that time flies and if you don’t make an effort to be there for your family, you might regret it when they are all grown up.

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