Intentionally Balanced: How to Create a Life Plan
Prefer to listen?
Your browser doesn't support HTML5 audio
Intentionally Balanced: How to Create a Life Plan
It’s the start of a new year and several of us are choosing words of the year or New Year’s resolutions to help us live more intentionally this year. However, in this post I am going to make a case for why we might want to consider going beyond one word-of-the-year or one resolution and instead take the time to create a strategic life plan. I will also unpack why doing so can help our work-life balance. So let’s jump into it!
What does life planning have to do with work-life balance?
I’ve said it before, but I want to say it again, work-life balance does not happen by accident.
Work-life balance can be defined as “being actively engaged in and having a sense of competence and satisfaction across life roles in accordance with personal values” (Hirschi, 2020, p. 2). Yet, we can’t expect to have a “sense of competence” or be “in accordance with personal values” without taking the time for self-reflection and defining our personal values and the goals that we have for our different life roles. It’s by setting these goals, in accordance with our values, that we can achieve a sense of competence and satisfaction across our life roles. This practice, identifying your values and goals for the different areas of your life is called life planning.
Further, work-life research spends a lot of time discussing resources (e.g., time, energy, money, etc.) and the important role they play in helping individuals manage their work and nonwork roles (Hobfoll, 1989; Ten Brummelhuis & Bakker, 2012). But our resources are limited; there is only so much to go around. By getting really intentional about your life values, goals, and priorities you can make sure that you’re spending your resources on the things that matter. You and I are striving for an elegant balance which means we want to approach our work-life balance in a way that is simple and effective. Effectiveness does not depend on the amount of effort that we exert, it depends on whether or not the effort we expend is focused on the right thing (Covey, 2020).
In this post, I want to walk you through the process I go through to plan my life. Don’t get me wrong, I’m fully aware of the fact that I can’t actually plan out everything in my life. There are several aspects that are completely out of my control and I recognize that. However, that doesn’t mean that I have to sit on the sidelines and wait for life to happen to me.
This post is for you if you have ideas, goals, dreams that you’d like to pursue in your life. It’s also for those of you who might feel like a spectator in your own life, wondering where the time has gone.
Throughout college I worked at the Rec Center. The director, Mr. Baker, had a question he liked to ask us student workers – “What’s your five-year plan?” I have to admit, the first time he asked me this I’m pretty sure that I just stumbled through a generic answer, but I learned to always have an answer to that question.
As we’re growing up, people constantly ask questions like “What do you want to be when you grow up?” or “When are you going to have children?”. Yet, once we’ve done those things, people stop asking and we stop paying as much attention to what we want to do with our lives. After getting married, finishing graduate school, having children, and landing my dream job I stopped having this same forward-thinking mindset. I guess I thought it was time to “settle in.” Yet, a few years ago, I read the book “Designing Your Life” by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans and it helped me realize that if I was going to achieve any of my other dreams, I needed to start living intentionally and actively create the life I wanted to have. In fact, by walking through the life-planning steps I’m going to cover in a minute, in this last year my husband and I were able to fully renovate a mid-century modern home – something we’ve always talked about doing someday, but also something that seemed risky or something other people did. Even this blog is a result of me getting really clear on my dreams and taking action to plan them, prioritize them, pursue them.
So, let’s jump into the 5 steps for creating a strategic life plan. To help you walk through these steps, I’ve created a worksheet to accompany this post. If you haven’t already grabbed it, you can download it here.
Step 1: Plan from your future.
Interestingly, when crafting a strategic life plan you don’t plan for the future. Instead, you plan from the future. By identifying where you want to be at the end of your life, you can work your way backwards; breaking things down into smaller, actionable steps that will take you where you want to go.
Take some time to reflect on the person you want to be. Ask yourself some of the following questions and take the time to journal out your thoughts. If you’re married, this exercise can also be done with a spouse.
1. At the end of your life, what type of life do you want to look back on?
2. What does it mean to have a life well-lived?
3. What types of stories do you want to tell your grandchildren?
4. Who do you want to be when you grow up?
Step 2: Identify your Target Areas
Based on your answers to those questions, identify the target areas that you need to include in your strategic life plan. These will be the overarching areas that you prioritize. Some sample target areas are Faith, Family, Health, Home, Work, Money, Education, Travel, Entertainment, and Food.
Step 3: Identify your Values
From here, we will work within each target area. Going one by one, identify the values you have related to that area. For example, under the target area of Home, some of my values are peace, connection, and beauty.
Step 4: Identify your Goals
Okay, we’re getting more and more specific. We’ve flushed out some of our overarching life questions, now you need to identify your goals related to each target area. These goals should align with your values that you identified in Step 3. If they don’t, you might need to reconsider why you have that goal. Is it something that you truly want to accomplish or is it something that you think you should accomplish? We want to clear the clutter of others’ expectations of us or goals that might sound good on paper but that aren’t really our dreams. That way we can make sure we’re spending our time, energy, and other valuable resources on the things that truly matter to us; things that will move us forward toward the life that we want to live.
Step 5: Plan and Schedule Action
Okay, the final step is to identify the actions that you can take this week, this month, and this year to work toward your goals. However, identifying these actions is not enough. You have to actually put them on your schedule and do them! I love how Tonya Leigh refers to this as scheduling your dreams. If we don’t put our dreams on our calendar we likely won’t take action toward them and run the risk of looking up in 1, 5, 10 years from now only to find that our life hasn’t changed the way we had hoped that it would. Dreams are accomplished one baby step at a time; let’s start taking those steps!
Obviously, things will change and you will have to reevaluate your life plan as they do. It’s a good practice to review it every 3 months or so to gauge 1) whether you’ve made progress toward any of your goals, 2) whether you’ve been prioritizing the right things or if you need to make adjustments, and 3) whether your life goals have changed. I want to leave you with one final reminder - you do not have to change your whole life in a day or even a year. Baby steps my friends! This exercise is simply to give you a road map for pursuing some of your big dreams.
References
Covey, S. R. (2020). The 7 habits of highly effective people. Simon & Schuster.
Hobfoll, S. E. (1989). Conservation of resources: A new attempt at conceptualizing stress. American Psychologist, 44(3), 513-524.