Letters to my Children. Balance Life's Responsibilities

Dear Mark, Christina, Melissa, Robbie, Keith and Tiffany -

Modern life is so busy that we often have difficulty balancing our responsibilities. There are so many good things we want to do in life that it is difficult to decide where to spend our limited time. Although I am 72 years old and have lots of experience, balancing my responsibilities is still difficult.

Here are four thoughts on balancing your responsibilities:

Write a Personal Plan

Where do you want to be 5 years? What bout 30- 40 years? How about 100 years from now? I will write more about writing a Personal Plan in a future letter, but for now remember that the focus of the Personal Plan is short term, retirement and eternity. As you probably already know, I think the focus of life is eternity. I wrote about eternal focus here. 

Balance Your MarketPlace Responsibilities

Strive to balance the responsibilities of your life while aligning your actions with your Guiding Principles. 

If you write your Personal Plan from a MarketPlace perspective, you will have identified four or more areas of responsibility. The tough job is to balance the time spent in each of these areas. I discipline myself to look at my calendar about 4 times per year and rebalance the time I spend in each of the areas of responsibility. If I don't do this, I tend to become a workaholic and begin to minimize relationships. If you are true to your Personal Plan, you will balance all the responsibilities in your life and successfully fulfill the roles you live. 

You earn what you receive (most of the time)

You are not punished for failure or rewarded for success, you earn the consequences of your actions and the results you produce. This is true most of the time.

If you constantly find yourself spending to much time in one particular area of responsibility (i.e. work) then you must carefully look at the causes and make adjustments. Work is or should be good. Work is necessary if we are to eat. But an employer who steals from employees is not a company to work for long term. And an employee who steals from the company by being a consistently lazy worker doesn't deserve the job.

I know that work is difficult and hard and time consuming because the Bible says that work will be difficult. It is the one area of responsibility that requires the most of our available time. And in my case work was the area of temptation that Satan used to steal me from family time when you were younger.

Exciting and Challenging

Developing and living a balanced lifestyle is exciting and challenging.