Balance: Like the Food Pyramid

Balance does not mean giving equal time to each area in our lives. We all have oodles of obligations each day, but some tasks are done in fifteen minutes, whereas others require hours of our time.


How do we determine if we're allocating our time properly?

We could look at it as scales where one side is weighed with family, work, and free time and the other is weighed with writing tasks. But the two will never be equal, so I don't like that picture.

I think of it more as the Food Pyramid. Each layer represents what I spend my time doing. The bottom layer is where I spend the brunt of my hours. The layer above it would be my next biggest time commitment, and so on.

Everyone's bottom layer will be different. Look at how your hours fill up. Put the activity you spend the most time at (besides sleep!) in this slot. Examples: work full time, homeschool your children, volunteer every day, write full time, or if you're a student, attend classes and study.

The next layer? Maybe this is where you put your writing, spending time with family, volunteering, driving the family carpool, or household management.

The middle layer might be your free time or anything else you spend a good chunk of time at each day. It's easy to think we have no free time, but is that really true? I have a few hours every night,and I've learned to give my brain a break during them. No, those hours aren't productive, but they are free.

The top layers are smaller tasks. Housecleaning, paying bills, writing-related activities that aren't huge time-wasters, keeping in touch with loved ones, running errands, and socializing.

If you aren't sure where your writing fits, keep a log for a week on how much time you spend at every activity. A typical day might look something like this.

Monday: 1 hour--getting ready, 9 hours--work, 1 hour--chores/dinner, 1 hour--helping Johnny with homework, 30 minutes--writing, 2 hours--television/Internet.
Your pyramid would be: bottom layer--work, next layer--family/chores, middle layer--relaxation/television, top layer--writing.
By looking at this, you might think, "Oh, I only wrote for 30 minutes." But how much free time did you have? Two and a half hours. Thirty minutes is 20% of your free time.

Sure, your writing is the smallest chunk of your day, but you're still making progress. Could you really squeeze more in without having your brain explode? And would you want to? Blech!

By the way, I can hear you laughing at that schedule. Where's the trip to the grocery store to pick up food for dinner, the lost fifteen minutes looking for Johnny's permission slip, the "quick" call to Aunt Lucy that turned into a half hour, the smelly cat litter which begged to be cleaned, the traffic jam on the way home, and the seventy-three loads of laundry? I know, I know!

Try not to feel discouraged if your life isn't allocated the way you want. No one's life is ideal. We have to work with what we have to find our own right balance.

Have a terrific weekend!

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