When it comes to priorities and life balance, I’ve written a lot about thinking in terms of days.
If Sleep/ Work/Recreational Time are priorities, split each according to the hours of your day (e.g. 8 hours each).
If Family/ Friends/Health are priorities, split each inside the 8 hours of “recreational time” you have (e.g. one hour meal time with family, one hour happy hour time with friends, one hour exercise every morning).
If Growth and Contribution are priorities, maybe block out 20 minutes to read, 20 minutes to write, and 20 minutes to help somebody just because.
And then there’s four hours left inside your “recreational time” to account for commutes, screen time, fun, snoozing, procrastinating, spontaneity, etc.
I like the idea of daily because every day we do the things that are priorities… it’s a good day.
It’s usually on the days when we aren’t able to hit our top priority areas that we feel like the day is a wash.
However…
It never plays out as simply as it’s laid out, does it?
Life gets in the way.
And when it does, a simple solution to keep your life balanced and in tune with your priorities is to shift from daily to weekly thinking.
…Put more time in at work than you planned? Subtract it from another day or deliberately block time for the missed priority on your more flexible days.
…Get caught in another media rabbit-hole and lose some high quality sleeping hours? If you can’t add it to the morning, ban yourself from even viewing media at all the next day or two.
Rebalance the week if/when you can’t rebalance the day.