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If Your New Year's Resolution Is 'To Get More Done,' Here's The Best Way To Do It

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It is time to clean away everything you know about time management. Photo credit: Wikipedia

Let us just say this up front to get it out of the way: You can’t have everything.

That doesn’t mean you can’t have the kind of life you want, but it does mean you can’t have everything you’ve ever dreamed of.

Everything you need? Absolutely. Everything you can imagine? No.

To understand the difference, picture a department store like Target, or whichever one you like. It is filled with 40,000 square feet (an acre) or maybe 100,000 square feet (two and a half acres) of stuff.

Clothing, sporting goods, jewelry, electronics, pots and pans. You name it, it’s there.  And for the most part the merchandise is pretty darn good for the price.

When you go into Target, you never expect to walk out of there with every single item in the store.  Why should you expect your life to be any different?

Would it be nice to have $1 billion in cash sitting in the bank; a movie-star gorgeous significant other with an IQ of 150; be CEO of the hottest, coolest company on the planet while simultaneously heading a non-profit foundation that is truly making a significant difference in people’s lives?

You bet.

And it would also be truly fabulous to go to Target and say “you know what, I will take one—no, make that two—of everything in the store, please.”

You bet.

But neither one of those things is going to happen.  So, stop worrying about it.  You can’t have everything.

However, you can have what you want in life, especially if what you want is both a fulfilling career and a rewarding personal life—but it may involve rethinking something that has been drummed into your head ever since you showed up for your first day of work at your first “real,” i.e. full-time, job.

From day one, someone has spoken to you about balancing your life and your career.  And the discussion always makes it sounds as if you are two separate people, the one you are at work and the other at home.

If you think about it that way you are going to drive yourself nuts.  Who wouldn’t want to give absolutely 100% of their energies to a job they adore and 100% of the energies to the family (and friends and activities) that they love?

What’s the problem with that?

The math.

Giving 100% to your job and 100% to your personal life adds up to 200% and there is only 100% of you.

You only have one life.           

The question is how are you going to allocate that finite 100% capacity that you have between work and non-work?

If you start with that question, you realize that the whole work-life balance conundrum is, at its heart, a time-management problem.  So, treat it that way.

Here's What To Do

No matter how many time management seminars you sit through, or “personal productivity” books you read, you always come away with the same lesson.

Once you get past rules like “only handle a piece of paper once,” and “try setting your clocks ahead 10 minutes,” you realize that the one big idea is this: Rank what is important to you—and work your way down the list as far as you can, before you run out of time.

The things you don’t get to are less important, by definition, than the ones you did, so you can forget about them with a minimum of guilt.

How does that help you when it comes to achieving the kind of life you want?  It’s simple.

Instead of keeping two lists of what you need to accomplish—one at work, the other at home—create one list.  Combine everything that you need to get done in both places, ranked in order of priority.

Maybe family/friends could occupy the first three spots; maybe work does.  Maybe work gets four of the top places ten places and family six.

What the list looks like doesn’t matter.  What does matter is that there is one list, with EVERYTHING you want to accomplish either at home and on the job written down in order of importance on that one piece of paper.

With you list in place, you start at the top and work your way down. What you get to, you get to. What you don’t won’t matter.

To go back to our Target analogy, it’s like having a shopping list when you visit the store.  You get the things on your list—you accomplish what is really important--and —and you walk out of the store happy.

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Paul B. Brown is co-author of Just Start published by Harvard Business Review Press.

Please note his blog appears every Sunday and Wednesday.

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