Last week, I started a series of posts on Work Life IMbalance. As is often the case, I started out with great intentions or really doing amazing things throughout the week. I’m getting ready to begin a month of traveling back-and-forth across the country a couple of times, and as such I really needed to take a lot of time to plan, prepare, and generally get things in order.

That meant that the seesaw of work-life balance was going to be skewed to all the things that I need to prepare around the house before I leave. It also meant a little bit of prep for the business, but with my continued progress towards an office without walls, it’s a lot easier to pick up and go somewhere knowing that I’ll be able to work from anywhere I have my computer and possibly an internet connection.

So during the course of the week, the teeter-totter has been leaning towards the home side. I’ve been trying to ensure that we’re prepared for the start of school in three weeks. I’ve been running around trying to make sure that all the athletic equipment for volleyball, swimming, and cross country is in place for the athletes in our family. I’ve been mowing grass, repairing yard care equipment, and generally doing all sorts of things that can only be done while I’m physically here at the Hectic Homestead.

Since this was my first week of trying considering the IMbalance that is going to occur, I spent a lot of time thinking about what I was doing. I started to realize that for every decision that I made to do something, I was also making a decision to not do something else. I was listening to one o Erik Fisher’s excellent podcast episodes of Beyond The Todo List and the guest talked about the idea of being intentional in everything we do. The idea was that we need to be making decisions about what we’re doing, not just going with the flow or letting life happen to us. I’d love to tell you which exact episode I was listening to, but it was one of the episodes after EP060. My Podcast app on my iPhone was very helpful and purged the listened to episodes before I sat down to write the blog post. All I know is that I listened to every episode from 061 through the latest episode (074 as of this writing) and it was in one of them. Oh, and the guest was a guy, so that narrows it down a little bit. Sorry I can’t be more help, but Erik’s podcast is so good you won’t lose out if you go ahead and listen to all the episodes.

Getting back on track, the idea of being intentional as to my decisions really resonated with me. I said last week that I was going to try to be aware of when I was working and when I wasn’t working. I managed to do that some. But this crazy week gave me plenty of opportunities to make very distinct decisions. Amidst all my preparations for my trip, my twin 22 y.o. daughters were both traveling part of the week. They arrived back home, unannounced about an hour apart after midnight one night. The next three days were spent preparing for one of the girls to move to her first job since her college graduation two months ago. She’s moving to Rochester, MN…so she’ll be nine hours away by car. Due to a series of circumstances, she’ll be in temporary housing for about six weeks. This required a lot of planning, packing, unpacking, and rearranging. To make matters more complicated, the car she was traveling in was filled with camping gear from a month roaming the western U.S.

So there were a lot of days when I tilted the seesaw towards helping her make decisions and prepare for her big move. I will admit that if I hadn’t started this IMbalance journey I’m not sure I would have made some of the good decisions I did make. Specifically, I would have probably continued to work in my home office when she really needed my help. I’m chalking up my awareness and actions to help her as a win.

I had also intended to focus on one of the 10 Daily Habits of Exceptionally Happy People. After looking over the list, I think I’m going to address it in reverse order. If you don’t follow me on Facebook, the 10 Habits are:

• I will not blame other people – for anything.
• I will not check my phone while I’m talking to someone.
• I will not multitask during a meeting.
• I will not interrupt.
• I will not waste time on people who make no difference in my life.
• I will not be distracted by multiple notifications.
• I will not whine.
• I will not let the past control my future.
• I will not wait until I’m convinced I will succeed.
• I will not talk behind another person’s back.
• I will not say yes when I really mean no.
• I will not be afraid.

Since I’ve decided to address them in reverse order, this week I’m going to focus on “I will not be afraid“. This one strikes me as a bit over-the-top. But as I got to thinking about it, I can see how it will work.

So, did you do anything to address or recognize how your life is IMbalanced this past week? I found the exercise pretty interesting. I caught myself thinking about what I was doing and assessing why I was going it quite a bit. As I travel over the next six weeks and have lots of opportunities to experience new things, go to new places, and help my kids make some really tough life-decisions, I will continue to deal with the IMbalance in my everyday life. Along the way I’m going to try and get some work done too.

Make it a great week!