Where Have All Your Hours Gone?

A friend was sharing with me how the turn over has been record high in her company, not because of higher pay packages or greener pastures out there but rather a result of more and more people re-prioritizing their lives to attain work-life balance. And the demanding work load and schedule just doesn't allow that.

Is this whole thing about work-life balance overrated? And how do we know which end of the scale we are at in this balancing act? Sometimes the best way to derive answers for such unperceivable questions is to quantify them!

Isn't this what we learn from our work anyway? How are we doing this quarter? Oh.. let's look at some numbers. Do you think we should grow this part of the business? Oh... let's look at some numbers. Sounds familiar hoh ;-)

Anyway, coming back to this.

Do not get overly excited because this is no ingenious formula at all. Friends who know me for long enough would know that with my aptitude for anything mathemetical (which is almost non-existent), I would not possibly come up with anything more profound than the times-table.

Step 1:
Classify your daily activities into 3 to 4 key areas which you spend time on (e.g. Work, Family, Personal Time). Of course if you are someone who is very anal about the granularity of things... by all means break them up into sub-categories like exercise, TV, reading, shopping etc... but hey... this is supposed to be a 5 min exercise and who has so much time anyway :)

Step 2:
Estimate the number of hours you typically spend on each area in a week.

Step 3:
With 168 hours a week, you can then easily work out the percentage of time you spend in each area.

It is so simple that I feel almost idiotic to have a step-by-step instruction.

So what is the whole point of this? Well, for a start, it presents you a quick view of how "balanced" your life is. And if that is not your idea of a "balanced" life, just start moving the hours around! Of course that is easier said than done.

A little insight to my current results...
Work: 30%
Justin: 12.2%
Personal: 9.8%

But that makes up only 52%...then I realised with shameless guilt that I spend a good half of my time SLEEPING ?!?! I tried to rationalise it with all the other miscellaneous stuff like showering, eating, dressing up blah blah but still.... I have some serious reshuffling to do.

Go do it when you have that few moments while waiting for that FB page to load or that computer to restart. It may yield interesting results.