The Magic Mouse from Apple is one of the most beautiful mice I’ve ever seen. But spend a couple hours using it and you’ll see that it’s ergonomics might not be quite up to snuff. There are  discussions here and here about how the Magic mouse might be better with ergonomics. In fact, there is a product created just to fix the ergonomic problem for people who want to continue using such a pretty device.

So, there’s no denying that the Magic mouse is absolutely beautiful, but not necessarily the best at what it is supposed to do. What happened is that Apple traded function for beauty. Undoubtedly, many people buy Apple products simply because they are so beautiful, but the company can’t forget why a user is using something.

The same goes for you and your website. (Or for you designers – how you design your websites.)

Out on the interwebs there are many gorgeous websites that might not function as well as they could for their intended users. They have also traded beauty for purpose. Creating a beautifully designed site is important – it has been shown to increase your sales and the perceived value of your product. But remember the purpose of your site (whether that be to give people information, get them to buy a product, etc
) and keep that purpose first. Make sure that your user doesn’t have a problem doing the what they came to do (more on that in a future post). When building a website it’s vital the “cool factor” and your design do not hinder your user’s experience.

Where have where have you seen examples of beauty taking precedence over functionality?

Or, read one of these:

1. Make Your Premium Services Wow

In January of 2010 I took a private business retreat that quickly turned into a holistic life retreat. One idea that really came to me as I meditated was the idea “Share Life.” It seemed like such an important epiphany that I added it to my personal mission statement:

• Simplify Life
• Enjoy Life
• Purify Life
• Share Life

And so this Creating Work/Life Balance series ends not with a 50-tip list for arranging your paper clips or a post on how to increase your productivity 1,000-fold, but a simple reminder to spend time with each other.

Because if you think about it aren’t the best parts of your life – the most glorious moments, the minutes filled with ringing laughter, the deepest experiences, the most special and significant seconds – aren’t they the times when you were together with other people?

Coming to this realization has put things into perspective for me. Now, part of achieving a work-life balance is being able to work little enough so that I have time for the important people in my life. Cause that’s what its all about. Spending time in a tea party with my daughter (even when she’s too young to remember it later!) becomes more important than doing more work for work’s sake. Turning off email to spend quality time in conversation with my wife just make sense. Flexing my schedule to help out a friend in the middle of the day becomes no big deal.

Work is nice and work is great, but let’s remember what’s really important at the end of the day, week, and career. The time spent with people is what we should be working for.

Life with a Capital L

And as a Christian sharing life is more than just hanging out with others. Its sharing the Abundant Life that has been freely shared with me. Its about sharing the Truth and Love that is Life and pouring love into other people as a calling in life.

Whether you life by faith or not, we should all take time to share the life we have with those less fortunate than us – either financially, physically or emotionally. Sharing life is just as much about helping others as it is anything else.

Do this Now:

Go make an appointment right now to hang out with someone (in person) that you should spend time with.

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Or, read one of these:

1. Separate Work and Life
2. Guest Blog Post on Creating a Healthy Work/Life Balance
3. The 2011 Apt Design Ebook – Creating Work/Life Balance

As a freelance designer I’m immersed in design all day, which works out great because I love design. Hopefully you love your job as well. But sometimes when we love our jobs we tend to want to keep doing them even when we’re not working. So we create hobbies – “personal projects” – that we do for fun oftentimes without getting paid for them. I know many designers, developers, writers and other business owners who spend plenty of unpaid time working on personal projects.

Personal projects are great.

But when they are essentially the same thing you do all day at your job, they don’t really help you become a fuller, more well-rounded person.

And I think that can be a problem.

Being Well-Rounded

Ancient cultures considered you to be a gentleman only if you were well-studied in many areas. Confucious said the “perfect man” is one who “combines the qualities of saint, scholar, and gentleman.” And in the 16th century the Italians said a gentleman needed “attainment in physical (sports and war) intellectual (education, literary and musical accomplishments) and also moral and social mores.” (source)

Being “well-rounded” will look different for each of us, but the whole point of being well rounded stems from the idea of being round, or being a complete circle. If your entire life is pencil-thin focused on one thing (like your job), then your are not filling out the circle of your life. I think a fuller life is one that is balanced. And that means having a variety of interests, hobbies, influences and experiences.

So, get a hobby. And get one that’s not the same thing as your job. In fact, in my opinion the further away your personal hobby is from your daily job the better. Be more than your job, more than just your profession. Basically, don’t let your work be your life. There are a myriad of new things waiting for you out there – go and explore them! You’ll be better for it.

Do This Now:

Similar to the exercise list, make a list of 3-5 new hobbies you’d like to try or new experiences you’d like to have. Then give yourself a month or two to try out each one.

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Or, read one of these:

1. Guest Blog Post on Creating a Healthy Work/Life Balance
2. Separate Work and Life
3. Find an Exercise You Love

Part of creating the right work/life balance in your life is creating balance in all areas of your life – emotional, spiritual, and physical. This post is just a quick reminder that being physically active is good for you in general, and the best way to be physically active is to find an exercise you love.

There has been immense amounts of research done that proves when people work out regularly they are happier, healthier, less stressed, and have better self-image.* (*And no, I don’t actually have specific sources for this, but everyone knows this is true I think) So why doesn’t everyone just exercise more?

Because for so many people exercising is a horrible experience. But here’s the thing – it doesn’t have to be.

There are an endless variety of ways to get your blood pumping and your body moving. You need to find a way to workout that you enjoy. You need to find what works for you! Only then will you be willing, and even excited, to exercise consistently.

In his great free ebook, Sustainable Fitness, Blair McHaney writes,

You need to feel like there is more to the exercise than just the exercise. You want to be able to look forward to this as much as possible. Here we are looking for two things – fun and peace of mind.

For me the answer is running. I love to run. If I’m ever feeling stressed out after a long day of work a few miles on the trail will unknot all the tightness in my shoulders. Running is a meditation, an escape, a peaceful solitude.

My wife thought I was crazy – how could anyone actually enjoy exercising? She had tried running and working out at the gym and thought of working out only as a negative thing. Then she found swimming. Now she can’t wait to get to the lap pool, and has even cut out other activities she doesn’t enjoy as much so she can have time to swim.

It doesn’t matter what it is – just find the exercise that you love and do it!

Take it Outside

If possible, take your exercise outside. Doing what you love only gets better when you are in nature as well.

When you find the exercise you love you get to reap the rewards of fitness: being happier, healthier, having more energy and being less stressed.

Do this now:

If you already know of an exercise you love commit to doing it 3 times next week. If you don’t have an exercise you love – make a list of 3 you’d like to try and give each one a shot over the next 3 weeks.

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Or, read one of these:

1. Find a Non-Work-Related Hobby
2. The 2011 Apt Design Ebook – Creating Work/Life Balance
3. 1 Simple Way to Love Your Job More

Finding time away from work used to be about “unplugging.” No more. Now we have numerous ways we can be literally “unplugged” while still be hooked into the stream of information, media and ideas that compromise our current internet and media. Now something pulls us in more than the plug – the ubiquitous screen. You probably don’t even realize how much time you spend in front of a screen, and that’s a problem.

The Ever-Present Screen

Screens are all around us and they follow us through every part of our day. Many people wake up to a screen – whether it be their cell phone or a tv. Morning shows dominate many pre-work routines. At work more and more of us are spending all day at a desk – staring at a great big screen. And even if its not at a desk laptops make it easy to take our work screens anywhere. For some of us staring at a screen is about all we do at work.

photo by Mitch

Once we’re done with work, we want to relax unwind. Enter the screen. TVs are on all the time in some houses, and everyone can relate to just wanting to veg in front of TV or a movie. Video games are more interactive but require even more attention on the screen. As ereaders take off in the marketplace even reading a good book is becoming dominated by a screen.

This isn’t to mention the ever-present screen in our pockets – our cell phones that force us to look at a screen to do anything on it. And look at it we do – checking our phone tens or even hundreds of times a day.

I think you’re getting the point, and you may be able to think of even more screens you use that I haven’t mentioned. The screen is everywhere.

Be Conscious

Now, this post might be coming off so far as anti-technology, anti-screen. That’s not how I mean it. All these screens I mentioned have good reasons for being in our life – that’s why we put them there in the first place!

I think the problem comes when we don’t realize how much time we spend in front of screens. Screens are an awesome conduit into something else. But we need to realize that as we engage them we are unengaging (to some degree) that which is really around us.

This whole thought comes from very personal experience. When I first thought about screen time and how much of my day is spent in front of one screen or another I was staggered. I still don’t have all the answers for what to do about screen time, but just being aware has made me more conscious as I choose what to do with my time.

Engage in Real Life

An important part of this work/life balance discussion is about taking control of our decisions to make our lives the best they can be. Realizing how much time you spend screened-in is just another piece in that decision-making process. You are limiting yourself in that decision if your immediate reaction to free time is to move to a screen. You can choose to get away from the screen for a time and engage in real life happening around you with real people.

Give your eyes and your brain a chance to relax.  Give your mind something different. Spend time in real, personal relationships with people you can reach out and touch. Go outside, engage with nature. Do something active and physical. There are thousands of things that don’t involve a screen. Want to spend time doing something else besides watching a screen? The choice is yours.

Do This Now:

This can be a tough realization to have. First of all just spend the next week being conscious of your screen time. How you choose to change that time in the next week is up to you.

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Or, read one of these:

1. Guard Your Time
2. Use the 80/20 Rule to Get More Time

Taking a dose of my own work/life balance medicine tonight and not going to finish the post for tomorrow. Posting a publishing schedule has been good to force me to write this series, but I think this is the perfect opportunity to put the balance idea into affect. We should be resuming next week with the post Reduce Screen Time. See you then!

(If you haven’t read them all you can still catch up on the work/life balance series up to this point!)

Or, read one of these:

1. Reduce Screen Time
2. The 2011 Apt Design Ebook – Creating Work/Life Balance
3. You Need a Break

You move fast.

Admit it. Much of the time, maybe most of the time, you hit the floor running and don’t get a break till you climb into bed at night. Its a problem so many of us are facing more and more in modern times.

Leo Babauta puts it this way in his book Focus,

We live in curious times. It’s called the Age of Information, but in another light it can be called the Age of Distraction. … never have the distractions been so voluminous, so overwhelming, so intense, so persistent as they are now. … More and more, we are connected, we are up to our necks in the stream of information, we are in the crossfire of the battle for our attention, and we are engaged in a harrying blur of multitasking activity.

But now a reversal has begun. You’ve seen it in plenty of other places before this blog post – a cultural movement to slow down, turn off the noise and live more freely. Here’s a look at some ways to live a better life by slowing down and doing less:

Don’t Do. Just Be.

In our current American culture there is so much emphasis on Getting Things Done. We make todo lists for every part of our life and there are thousands of books and videos telling us how to be more productive. Built into our modern worldview is the idea that we are only worthwhile if we are accomplishing something.

Break that thought habit. You don’t need to be constantly doing. Take some time to stop doing and start being. Relax and be yourself. Think quietly. Reflect. Breathe. Look at the stars. Sip tea by yourself while the sun rises. Pet a sleeping animal. Just sit and be.

Kill the Need to Know Instantly

In the past it took awhile to hear about things that had happened. You may not read about events until days, weeks or even months later. As our technology has advanced the time it takes for us to find out about things has significantly decreased until now there are an endless amount of ways for you to know what’s going on as it happens.

People used to survive without that instant knowledge. You still can.

You don’t need to know everything that happens the second that it happens. Try turning off whatever it is that’s constantly bombarding you with the immediate and the now and the urgent. The less you are being invaded with what is happening elsewhere the more you can focus on what is happening where you are. The point is not to see how long you can go without the stream of information, but to kill the need to know everything instantly.

Urgent is Poison

This need for doing things immediately is often worst in your job. You see it stamped across papers and blaring its little “!!!” at you in your inbox. Its called Urgent. And its poison. Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson from 37Signals put it this way in their book Rework:

Most things just don’t warrant that kind of hysteria. If a task doesn’t get done this very instant, nobody is going to die. Nobody’s going to lose their job. It won’t cost the company a ton of money. What it will do is create artificial stress, which leads to burnout and worse.

Relax a little. Slow things down. Enjoy being without doing.

Do This Now:

Try this. Find 5 full minutes to lay on the floor quietly and do nothing but breath and clear your mind of thoughts. 5 full minutes. I think you’ll find 2 things: 1. It will be harder than you think and 2. Afterwards you will feel even better than you would have thought.

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Or, read one of these:

1. Guard Your Time
2. Separate Work and Life

Putting in 12-hour days. Constantly being stressed about work. Not being able to sleep because you’re thinking about your job. Not spending quality time with your loved ones because you’re always at the office…

No one wants to live like this. Working non-stop is not a life anyone aspires to. The problem is that kind of life can be an easy trap to fall into if you don’t have clear boundaries between your work and the rest of your life.

When you separate work and life and focus on them individually you get better focus, attention and results in each. Not only that, but people deserve a separation between you work and your life.

Customers & Clients

Your clients/customers/employer are paying you for your time, and they deserve to get what they pay for. If you are constantly letting yourself be distracted from your job by making dinner, chatting with friends, or working on your kids Halloween costume you are doing your clients/customers/employer a disservice. Actually, you’re cheating them of what they rightfully paid for.

Clients deserve to have your full attention on their project while you’re on the clock. If you work from home it helps to have a separate, specific space for work. When you’re there you’re at work and shouldn’t be disturbed. But its the same wherever you work. While you are getting paid focus on giving value to the people paying you.

Family

Your family and friends deserve for you to pay attention to them while you are with them too. Continuing to work (so easy to do now with smart phones, laptops and tablets) even while physically present doesn’t fly. It devalues the relationships of the people you’re with. When you’re with your family they deserve all of your thoughts and attention. This is a lesson Henry learned the hard way when his daughter essentially called him “Daddy Who Seems To Be Here But Actually Isn’t”.

Likewise, even being mentally distracted by work can really hinder your experience of life. Practice being present in relationships (your spouse will thank you), conversations and even menial activities. Zone in on who you’re with and what you’re doing.

You

Know who else it helps when you separate work and life? You.

You deserve to not be working all the time, you deserve to have a life too. If you constantly have work thoughts fluttering in the back of your head while  living the rest of your life – doing activities you enjoy – you are robbing those experiences of their full richness. Even if you love your job, be more than your job! Be a fuller, richer person who doesn’t always have to be thinking about one thing. Take a break, get away, relax! You can’t fully do that if you’re work-brain is always on.

Do This Now:

Tonight, spend an entire evening with your family. No work calls, emails, tweets – nothing related to your job. If you need to, schedule it with your boss or your clients – let them know you’ll be unavailable. Completely focus on your family, your friends and yourself.

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Or, read one of these:

1. The 2011 Apt Design Ebook – Creating Work/Life Balance
2. Share Life
3. Guest Blog Post on Creating a Healthy Work/Life Balance

Now that you know what you want in life and you’ve set your priorities based on that, its time to start making changes that will get you to that life. As I mentioned in my last post, one of your greatest resources is your time. More often than not its a resource that we too easily let slip away and then wonder where it went.

Numerous distractions, “important” projects and mindless activities can quietly suck away our time, time that we could be using to create the work-life balance we want. Focus on removing these little things that are stealing your time and you’ll have more to spend where you want –  on things that help you reach your goals and priorities in life. Guard your time, protect, and value it as the resource it truly is.

Look at where your time is going

The first step to good time management is to realize where you are currently spending your time. You probably don’t realize the amount of time that you’re spending on certain things – it may be water-cooler talk at the office, constantly checking your farm on Farmville, or even just mindlessly basking in the glow of your TV every night.

There are a variety of ways to actually see where you spend your time. When you are on your computer (a place where we all waste massive amounts of our day) you can use a time-tracker like RescueTime, which can also block distractions to help you focus on your current task. But if you are really struggling with needing more time I would recommend tracking where you spend all your time every day. At the end of every hour record what you’ve been doing for that hour. There are a plethora of generic time-tracker apps out there, pick one that works best for you – or just use a pencil and paper! Is this a boring and anal-retentive exercise? You bet. But I guarantee at the end of the week you’ll be surprised to see where all your time went!

Learn to Say No

After you’ve seen where you’re spending your time the next step in guarding your time is learning to say “No” to the things you don’t want to spend your time on. A lot of time is wasted at work in inefficient things like pointless meetings, and you may need to talk to your boss about this. Timothy Ferriss has some great points about saying No at the office in chapter 7 of his controversial book, The 4-Hour Work Week.

Learning to say no may involve you choosing to discipline yourself enough to turn off a video game and go exercise. It could even involve you saying no to activities you enjoy or organizations whose goals you agree with. But if you are drowning in commitments you need to review your priorities and not say yes to everything. Leo at ZenHabits offers some practical help on how to say No.

The choice is always yours. Learn to say No.

Set boundaries

Too often the reason we say Yes to too many things is because we think we can do more than we can. And we all know the feeling of stretching ourselves too thin. The first step in not doing this is to know your limits. I wrote about this important concept (and how marathoner Ryan Hall used it) in my post at Graphic Design Blender: Creating a Healthy Work-Life Balance as a Freelance Designer. The idea is simple in theory but can be hard to implement – know your limits on how much time you can give to other people and activities, give yourself some padding, and then set your boundaries there and don’t let anything else in.

Overall guarding your time is an integral part of creating work/life balance. The better you get at it the more you choose how your life will be balanced.

Do This Now:

Right now look at your least important, most disliked, or biggest time commitment and drop it. Call or email those that need to know right now and tell them you’re done. There you go! A quick, bloodless step to getting more time to create the work/life balance you want!

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Or, read one of these:

1. Separate Work and Life
2. Reduce Screen Time
3. Know What You Want

Now that you’ve decided what you want for your life, its time to start prioritizing your time and energy to achieve that life.

Your Priorities

I’m big on creating goals, as they can be a great way helping you continually improve yourself and your life.  An interesting addition or alternative to creating goals is to make a list of your life’s priorities. I’ve found my goals sometimes change during the year as new circumstances arise and I want room to make adjustments. So I’ve started making a list of the top 5 or 6 priorities in my life, and listing out goals under each one. The goals are SMART, but they may change or adapt. The priorities are more general and guide overall decisions about how I spend my time and energy.

Reprioritize Your Time

Your time is one of your most valuable commodities. But too often how we spend our time is decided by others. We need to take back control of our time. Its scarce and its valuable – but its yours. Don’t give it away easily.

Knowing your priorities in life will help you rethink your current schedule and how it is set. After looking at your priorities you might decide an extra hour at work isn’t as important as your son’s soccer game. Perhaps watching TV may become less important than working on the fiction book you’re writing. Maybe cutting back on how long you spend at lunch each day lets you get home sooner to play with your kids. However your time is used become more conscious of your decisions to spend it.

Reprioritize You Energy

We all have times when we are full of our best energy. Schedule your life so that this important energy is spent on your greatest priorities. If the only time you have for your family is after you are drained from a 12 hour workday you may need to think about where you’re spending your best energy.

Putting priority on what you define as important in your life will begin to shift importance away from what others define as a priority. Reclaim your time and your energy and harness it to create the work/life balance you want.

Do This Now:

Take out a blank sheet of paper and make a list of the 5 most important things you want to focus on in your life – your priorities. Go and finish this list before you read on…
Now that you’ve made the list of your priorities, make a list of the 5 things you spend the most time/energy on. Consider the discrepancies in your lists and work towards making them match up more closely. It may help to talk these lists over with your spouse or a friend and get their opinion.

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Or, read one of these:

1. Guard Your Time
2. Share Life
3. Find a Non-Work-Related Hobby