Don Kowalewski
Writer. Ad Sales and Marketing. Social Media Content Creator. Aeropress Coffee. Makes the best salsa in the world.
Balance
At a staff meeting last week, the entire group was prompted to share their goals for 2015. Mine was lame – to write down a minimum of 4 specific goals each week and do those things. To make it public, as in, detail them in my weekly 1-on-1 with my direct report, and thereby be held accountable by my own hubris.
Wow. That was a boring opening paragraph. Apologies to all my high school English teachers for disobeying their first rule of writing an opening paragraph – make it energizing and attention-getting.
OK, back to my weekly staff meeting (and back to excitement!!!). I said I’d make a to-do list (holy crap, really, Don?!?! A to-do list?!?!?), while others went more cerebral. Especially A.T., who said she wants to work on “balance.”
She laid it out so simply.
24 hours in a day. Minus 8 hours of sleep. Minus 8 hours for work. Which should leave you 8 waking hours for yourself.
What? Do I really have 8 hours of each day for myself? And I’m counting “myself” as time with my kids (even the obligations that come with having kids that some might not call “me time.”).
But do I really have these mythical 8 hours. What am I doing with these 8 hours?
Well, I have 1-hour of commute time. Who does that hour belong to? I need to reclaim that. Truth be told, I only sleep 7 hours (at most), but I’ll lump the cool down time, the sluggish wake-up time, and even shaving and showering into that block of “sleep” time and call it “8 hours.” And I actually work from about 8:00 a.m. until 5:30 and mostly work through a “lunch hour”. So that’s 9.5 hours.
All that said, I should have right around 7 hours.
My question to myself… do I really do 7 hours worth of living with the time given me? Do any of us?
This week, I’m going to examine those 7 daily hours and figure out just what the heck I’m doing with all that “time to myself.”
Good stuff, A.T. Really got me thinking.
Follow me at @donkowalewski.
Don Kowalewski 
If you fail to plan, then you yada yada etc