Balancing your lifestyle is so much more than burning sage and doing yoga, it is a process and practice that takes time, clarity, commitment, and boundaries in all areas of your life as you optimize and level up.
To get you started, here is a quick, step-by-step refresh that you can do right now to help simplify your schedule and create more time in your day so you feel more balanced, in your power, and less spread thin and overwhelmed.
STEP ONE: LIGHTEN YOUR LOAD
There is no point in trying to balance your lifestyle if you don’t detox it first.
That would be like organizing your jam-packed and messy closet without donating or getting rid of clothing that is outdated, never worn, or filled with holes
Without detoxing, you just have more to organize, more to keep up with, and more on your shoulders.
Balance that is sustainable means consistently detoxing the non-essential and the negative while focusing your time and energy, proportionally and intentionally on what is essential to your well-being and the lifestyle you ultimately want to live.
Consider all aspects of your life: relationships, work, fitness and health, and emotional well-being, family, etc. and think about ways you can lighten your load in each of those areas.
A great place to start your lifestyle detox is through setting boundaries, eliminating what isn’t essential or serving you, saying no, and prioritizing where and how you spend your time so you can reduce unnecessary feelings of stress and exhaustion while also naturally creating more time in your schedule.
STEP TWO: MAKE EVERYTHING AN EVENT
Using a calendar to help keep us organized, schedule work events and personal appointments, and shape our days is nothing new to us.
It’s important to make sure our obligations are planned in so we don’t forget about them, but just because they’re on the calendar, we tend to assign greater value and importance to them.
The rest of the time that is unscheduled, can obviously be spent in a myriad of ways, but feeling out of balance and overwhelmed comes with trying to do it all without intentionality. Living a lifestyle with no balance is simply just being disorganized with how, when, and where you spend your time and energy.
So rather than just putting your appointments in your daily schedule, start putting EVERYTHING into your daily schedule.
Use an app like Google Calendar so you can see an hour by hour view of your day.
With a clear start and end time down to the minute add into your calendar when you’re going to go to sleep, eat, spend time with your family, wake up, do your morning routine, exercise, work on your side hustle, cook, and whatever else you need to prioritize in order to balance out your lifestyle.
You can even have MORE flexibility and spontaneity by scheduling in and making an event out of “Fun Time” in- even if you don’t know quite what you’re doing yet.
You may not follow everything down to the exact minute, but simply thinking it out and planning it on your calendar gives you a tangible way to control where and how you’re spending your time.
Just like it’s important to know how each of your dollars is being spent because every dollar adds up, its even more important to know where each of your minutes are being spent because every minute adds up to what is essentially your whole life.
You can make everything in your life an event, and when you have them scheduled into your daily agenda, you can heighten your intentionality even more by making the ultimate experience out of each thing, even if it’s something as simple as cooking dinner at night.
STEP 3: INVEST IN YOURSELF
Now that you’ve lightened your load to create more time in your schedule, and learned the technique to making an event out of day to day and normal activities in your life, it’s time to start investing in yourself and intentionally scheduling in appointments for self care– however that looks to you.
Here are some ideas for self care, all of which you can schedule into your day-to-day agenda to enrich your life and help you stay balanced:
- Spend a few minutes on relaxation each day- like taking a bath or meditating
- Enjoy a cup of coffee and some quiet time reading or journaling before everyone else wakes up
- Schedule in time each week to do a hobby you love or to explore a new hobby you’ve always wanted to try like a fitness program, art class, social group, reading, gardening, etc
- Schedule in a fun workout during the weekend with your loved ones! For example, go for a hike with your partner, bike ride with your kids, or play a round of golf with your parents! You can mix a fun activity with exercise and spending time with the ones who matter most to you
This will reduce your stress, help you design a fulfilling lifestyle, and overall boost your happiness so even when life gets out of hand, which it always does at some point, you have a foundation of self care and itention.
Balancing and designing the lifestyle you crave is a process and a practice that takes time and commitment, but even the smallest baby steps can get you miles closer to living a truly balanced lifestyle in your power.