I have a presentation on finding balance in your career that got quite a few people thinking and commenting on their own experiences. I decided to write a few posts supporting the ideas in the presentation, which my wife and I have used to both drive our careers forward while enjoying our lives.

Just this week, I had an example.

This is a series of posts on finding balance in your career.

It Starts with a Picture

My daughter told me this happened Monday afternoon. This is one of our horse feeders, and as you can see, the bottom has fallen out.

This happens periodically, but it was unexpected. In this case, I’d returned from a week and a half of travel, and I needed to try and get prepped for some additional travel the following week.

In other words, I had plenty of work to do, lots of commitments in life already in place, and now something new pops into my life.

This isn’t critical, but it is something I need to get done before I leave again, which left me limited time around work, coaching commitments a few nights a week, trying to get time to exercise to maintain my health, cooking for the family while I’m here, and, of course, getting time to relax.

I decided I’d have to find time in a couple ways. First, I got up a little early, 30 minutes, the next day and started working. When my daughter texted that she was getting the tractor out, I took a break and went outside to meet her and bring the feeder back to the house.

I then evaluated what was needed and realized I needed some wood from the hardware store. Fortunately, I had a meeting scheduled that I didn’t need to speak in, so I started to town while listening to the meeting in the car.

Multi-tasking FTW.

I had almost completed my trip to town when the meeting ended. I drove back and went back to work, handling a few tasks, editing an article, etc. Once I thought I had gotten most things done for the day, I took a break.

It took about 75 minutes to cut some wood and re-attach the pieces and parts in the feeder. I’d cut into my day a bit, but fortunately work is flexible and I can work a little longer on Wednesday to make up for the time missed.

That extra work will cut into my time to relax, but this is an unexpected issue, and I have to trade time somewhere. Making adult choices, I flexed work to get something in my life done sooner, and spread that flex across two days so that I wasn’t overloaded.

Less time to relax, but that happens some weeks. Especially with horses.