Work life balance is the new Holy Grail; that search for nirvana; the need to find peace and contentment, the desire to achieve that fine sense of equilibrium that we can be happy with.

For some people that means not working at all but, for many it means being happy with the amount of hours they spend at and think about work and are equally happy about their none working hours; whether that be time spent with family and friends or time spent participating in sports, music or other hobbies or indeed just relaxing doing nothing in particular except just being!

However, the achievement of this perfect balance seems to escape so many people and I believe that's because the important things and I mean the truly important things, get overtaken by the urgent stuff! Of course important to you may be different than important to me, but I bet neither of us would wish the sum total of our lives to be an accumulation of the achievement of stuff, trivia and emails!

So many people say that vacation time is important yet they rarely take a vacation; so many people say their health and "keeping fit" is really important to them yet they rarely do any exercise and eat on the run most of the time; so many people say its really important to plan their time effectively yet they fire fight from day to day.

So what can you do to get one step closer to your particular version of a good work life balance?

Put simply ? decide what's important in your life. Once you have really thought about that, the rest is easy.

If you say spending at least 2 hours a day with your family is really important to you then make it so. If you say making time each day to speak with each of your team members for 15 minutes is important then make it so. Other things may crop up that may seem important but most of the time the urgency of them is either determined by someone else or only appears more important because it is happening at that moment in time.

It is up to you to make a conscious choice about the importance or not of everything that shows up in your life be it at work or in your personal or social life.

Do you really want to get to the final years of your life, look back and say well I least I got all my emails done!

"Make decisions from the heart and use your head to make it work out." Sir Girad

?2005 Beverley Hamilton About The Author Beverley Hamilton is the author of Take Control of Your Time: 7 Straight Shooter Strategies for Success. To learn more, subscribe to Quickstart her free ezine and get more tips, tools and articles visit at One Step Further

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