(Photo by mnemophobe)

In this day and age, most of us are wearing many hats at the same time. At the most basic level, you are someone’s son/daughter, boy/girl friend, husband/wife, father/mother, and also your professional role. For some, the list of roles that you take on in life is even longer; but the most basic list alone is already a great challenge to juggle.

Each of these roles places many demands for your time and energy. Sometimes, these demands conflicts with each other and you find yourself stuck in between, trying to fulfill your obligations to these roles at the same time.

One common challenge is being a working mother. The needs from your family and your career places huge demands on your attention, time and energy. How do you manage between a forthcoming product launch (which requires you working late nights), and spending quality time with your husband and kids?

Another common challenge; how do you spend quality time with friends and maintain frequent contacts, while you are busy building (or slogging) a high-flying career?

Is it true that you cannot have your cake and eat it? Well, I like to believe that you can. As long as you have the correct mindset, knowledge and tools. By the end of this article, you will learn the steps necessary to focus on the different important roles in your life, and to be able to successfully balance between the demands of these roles.

Below is my recommendations of a 6 steps process, based on my own experiences which has worked well for me.

6 Steps To Succeed At Multiple Roles:

Step 1 - Determine Your Roles. You need to have a very clear picture of what roles, both personal and professional, that you are playing in your life. Write down on a piece of paper the list of roles that you play today. The list should include things like ’son’, ‘husband’, ‘manager’ etc… The point here is that you need to know and be conscious about what roles are taking up your time and energy, knowingly or unknowingly.

Review your list of roles; ideally, there should be between four to six roles, maybe seven or nine if you are really capable. Anything beyond ten is really just stretching yourself too thin.

Step 2 - Determine Success For Each Role. For each role listed, think and write down two to three points on what you believe will be defined as success in that role. Taking the role of “son” as an example, I would probably have the following:

• Having dinner and interacting with my mother at least once a week.
• Enrich her life by encouraging her to interact and learn more.
• Achieving accomplishments that will make her proud of me.

There is no right or wrong answer, as your circumstances and needs from your role or people in your life may differ. However, I do encourage that you try to define the success not only from your own perspective, but also from the perspective of people in-concern i.e. your family, colleagues or stakeholders.

The importance of the second step is develop a conscious awareness of what you (and others) will define as success needed for that role. Let’s face it; there are many demands out there, and with only 24 hours each day, and so many roles to play, you really want to focus on the things that matters, don’t you? If you do this and think through this step carefully, you will be able to filter out non-important issues when they happen.

Step 3. Plan “Big Rocks” into your weekly schedule. Using a manual calendar planner or simply your MS OutLook, make it a habit to plan your week ahead in advance. In your weekly planning, think about tasks or appointments that will contribute to your successes as defined in Step 2. These important things are termed “Big Rocks”.

Back to the example using the role of “son” earlier, I would first schedule a dinner meeting during the week, to make sure that I “locked” the quality time required to spend with my mother.

Do this for every role that you have. By the time you finish for every role, you should have scheduled quite a bit of of your week ahead. This is fine, because you know you have just booked quality time needed for your success in various roles.

The point about Step 3 is that you “lock” your time for important things ahead, so that when you start to dive into the weekly actions (and get lost in the process), you don’t conveniently forget about important things in your life.

Step 4 - Fill in the “small pebbles”. This step is easy. Just fill up the rest of your other available time on your scheduler for other things in your life. Be it firefighting last minute issues at work, or enjoying a good beer session to treat yourself; anything. The best part is that you can do these knowing that you have the most important things, the “Big Rocks”, already covered.

Step 5 - Live Your Plan Flexibly. After the planning is done. The rest is action on the plan. Go through the week as planned in your calendar. It will be ideal if you can have your calendar with you most of the time. That will help keep you reminded and focus.

One thing to highlight here is that you have to be flexible about living your plan. Things will change, naturally; as things happen at the last minute to disrupt your plans. Go ahead, make the changes to your plan and adjust accordingly without feeling guilty about it. However, try to remember to reschedule “Big Rocks” to another time slot (if possible), so that you don’t missed out on the important stuffs too often.

Step 6 - Review Your Roles and Success Criteria Periodically. Lastly, at least every half a year, look back on your roles and “Big Rocks”.

If you have being following the above 5 Steps, you will be pleasantly surprised by how much you have accomplished in your roles. All those little weekly actions on “Big Rocks” will have accumulated into “Big Boulders”, given enough time.

At the same time, review which roles you have been consistently failing to achieve success at. Take a good look at it, and ask yourself if that is a role which you want or is suitable for. Or maybe review the success criteria. If you have consistently, not been able to commit yourself to work on a particular role and its success, it is probably a good indication to yourself to look very hard at it, and see if it is still relevant.

Conclusion

At the end of the day, it is really important that you develop an awareness of the roles that you are playing in your life, and the things that are important to you in these roles. Only in doing so, can you focus your actions amidst the daily cacophony, filter out the unnecessary “noise”, have balanced efforts in each role, not to neglect any one of these and be successful in your life.

Don’t be disheartened if your weekly plans don’t get executed smoothly in the first few months. The above 6 Steps process is a self-correcting process in that your actions over time will help you to understand what are the things that are truly important to you. As much as it is a time management process, it is also a self-awareness process.

I hope the above 6 steps will serve you well.

This blog is about leading a balanced life focusing on career, relationships and money. You can read more about balancing your life here. These articles are written for you. If you find them useful, feel free to subscribe for regular updates as new articles are posted. It's FREE. :)