WILMA C. INVENTOR-MIRANDA l April 19, 2023 l Business Mirror
IN the book by my favorite author Stephen Covey, “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People,” he wrote a story about the rock-pebble-sand-water-in-a jar. You probably guess it right that the rock represents the important things in our lives such as our religious beliefs, marriage, family, children, work and what have you—whatever is of value and of importance to you.
The less important but also necessary things in our life that we have to do on a regular basis; such as going to the grocery, answering phone calls and emails, driving, etc are represented by the pebble, sand and water.
The more sand, pebbles and water we place in our jar the lesser space for the rocks. Thus, it is important that we should fill our jar first with the rocks before we fill it with the rest. This is a perfect illustration on how we should plan our life. What are the goals we want to achieve? If it is material gain, then we should be ready to sacrifice our time with the secondary goals. Moreover, we should be ready to reap the consequences.
One classic example is that of an executive whose goal is to buy a property and build a house in one of the high-end villages in the country. He travels several times in a month because of his work, hardly having enough time for his family because, even when in Manila, he works long hours. Before he realized it, his wife and children left him one day, and there is nobody left in his luxury home except him and his helpers.
Work-life interface is bidirectional as work can interfere with private life and private life can interfere with work. That is why there is such a thing as work-life balance.
However, work-life balance is not easy since our work or our businesses ensure that there is food in our tables; that when “rainy days” come, we have reserves as buffers.
But in a statistic by Aviva statistics dated August 24, 2022, it shows “that more workers are more attracted to the work-life balance (41 percent) than the salary (36 percent)—a switch in rankings compared to 2019, before the pandemic.” The pandemic made people realize more the importance of family, health, relationships and so on.
Everybody agrees that work-life balance is important but achieving it is easier said than done. Nevertheless, it is not impossible. It is a matter of how you juggle work and personal life and setting the right priorities.
People in the workplace, even business owners, are now looking beyond salaries and/or profits and are considering non-monetary benefits in gauging their satisfaction in their workplaces or in their businesses.
Consequently, people are looking for more ways to manage their time wisely, placing due consideration in the time they spent on work and personal life.
However, it is not only work that can affect your personal life. The other things—pebbles, stones and water—can be the time you spend on social media, in hobbies such as playing computer games, in socializing and many other “time-robbers” that we are not even aware of.
Social media can take a huge trunk of your hours. This is one area that you should learn to control. I observed that when I started to check my social media accounts first thing in the morning, my time is spent the whole morning replying to comments or scrolling on what other people do with their lives, or replying to messages; which we realized later are not on top of our to-do list for the day.
Instead of spending the early hours of the morning in a quiet time by reading or writing in my journal or working out, the rest of my schedule for the day went crazy because I failed to control my time in social media.
I also know of many people both young and old who were hooked on computer games or Korean movies or soap dramas that, before they knew it, they were already addicted to these activities.
Achieving a work-life balance results to fewer health problems, more engagement levels in work resulting to higher productivity and other benefits for the business. A person who experiences “burnout” cannot reach his full creativity potential and will not be efficient in his work.
On the other hand, we should also be conscious of what we do with our time, that we are not wasting it on non-productive activities. Our priorities are a result of our goals—we can only set the right priorities if we know what our goals in life are.
*** Wilma Miranda is the chairman of the Ethics Committee of the Financial Executives Institute of the Philippines, a managing partner of Inventor, Miranda & Associates, CPAs, a member of the Board of Directors of KPS Outsourcing Inc. and Treasurer of the Negros Outsourcing Services Inc. The views expressed herein do not necessarily reflect the opinion of these institutions and the BusinessMirror.