Frequently, work-life balance is spoken of like it’s some kind of ideal end state. We schedule the various facets of our lives one time, and that serves us well for the foreseeable future.  But, as anyone who’s actually lived a day in reality, we know that nothing is a constant. There’s reasons for sayings like “The only certainties in life are death and taxes,” and “The only constant is change,” and “Life is what happens while you’re making plans.” The environment we live and work in is constantly changing, leading to new situations, information, and priorities.

So how do we deal with this and still reach that (ongoing) state of balance? Develop the skills of flexibility and adaptability.

These skills are important in many facets of life. Here’s a few areas and some examples:

Home:

How often does your schedule change at home? Hockey practice moved from Tuesday to Monday, people coming by for a visit on Friday, so you have to get the groceries done Thursday night instead? And how is that going to affect the workout you usually do at that time? Oh, they offer that Monday as well? Sure, except that now conflicts with the just moved hockey practice.

Work:

You’re busy as it is. You’ve got your annual report that’s due next week, that other project you’ve been working on for months, and now you’ve got to drop everything and get on a plane to go visit a high-profile customer. All those meetings you had this week now need to be rescheduled, and all that project planning might need to be re-done.

Schedules aren’t the only things that can change. Sometimes it’s equipment (your hard drive crashes, losing all your data, or your cell phone is stolen). Maybe a person you were supposed to be working with has left their role, and now you’ve got to adjust to working with a different contact. Maybe your project’s importance has grown due to changing organizational goals, and the scope has expanded, leading to a complete redesign of your massive GANTT chart, or perhaps due to changing goals your project has been canned completely!

These situations aren’t uncommon in today’s world, and when they crop up, we’re really left with two choices. We can either whine, complain, and try to resist the change, or we are flexible, adaptable, and adjust to the new environment, goals, schedule, people or whatever else you may be facing. One of these leads to frustration, burnout, and potentially failure, and the other can lead to satisfaction, happiness, productivity, and potentially wild success. Which do you think is which?

So what can you do to foster these skills? A big portion of this comes down to living in the present. To generally meet all the commitments and obligations we have in our lives, we need some degree of future planning. If we know we want vacation next summer, sometimes we need to plan it well in advance to ensure that everyone can get the same time off, or to get that great deal on a flight or hotel. Likewise, if you’re managing a four million dollar software roll out, having a well planned implementation period is pretty much par for the course. But where this level of detail isn’t required, don’t plan things to death. This is for two main reasons:

  1. If you’ve got something planned, that’s a commitment. If you then fail to meet that plan, that is a broken commitment, and can cause stress, whether or not the plan has changed for a good reason or not. This stress makes it much harder to balance things.
  2. Simply put, planning takes time. If you spend hours of your life planning something to the nth degree for months out in the future that is only going to change in the next day or two anyways, you’ve essentially wasted those hours.

The basic message is plan as much as is needed for each situation. Too much and you get the things I’ve just mentioned, and too little, and you’re stuck always reacting to life. There is no one size fits all method of planning, the key is to find the right balance for each situation. Sometimes this will be fairly obvious, other times you might have to learn through trial and error.

This leads to another quick point. Trial and error isn’t fundamentally bad. As long as you’ve learned from the error, and don’t repeat the mistake, it can be beneficial. But when you ignore the lessons learned and consistently repeat the same mistakes, that is a problem. Just like in nature, the organisms that don’t adapt to changing environments don’t survive.

A lot of this just comes through experience, but experience is much easier to attain if you’re conscious of your goals. If you are working on improving your adaptability, keep that in mind when facing challenging situations.

If you’ve got any other specific tips for improving on your flexibility (mental, not physical), please share them!

Cheers,

Adam

UPDATE:

For some tips on staying present, check out Leo’s article A Simple Guide to Being Present for the Overworked and Overwhelmed over on Zen Habits!