Striking a Balance
In her work as a certified life and business coach, Deb Levy stresses that success depends on finding a healthy balance among all your priorities.
As a concept, balance is tricky. You can’t possibly dedicate equal amounts of time to all of your priorities. Instead, Levy likes to think of it as “school/work/life sanity.”
The balance includes:
- A state of satisfaction and engagement
- The ability to cope effectively with challenges in specific areas of your life so they don’t interfere with or inhibit engagement with others
- A healthy stress/recovery ratio and stretch/comfort ratio, allowing you to move gracefully between responsibilites
If you can find that healthy balance, you’re more likely to experience:
- Increased engagement
- Increased productivity
- Positive relationships (at work, with family, etc.)
- Better performance
- Increased satisfaction
Keys to Achieving Balance
Levy says that a successful path forward involves three key steps:
1. Set Effective Goals
When creating a roadmap for success — for a course, project, or semester — setting goals will help fuel your journey. But how do you set goals that you’re motivated to accomplish? Levy recommends using the following criteria.
A good goal is:
Intrinsic. It is meaningful to you, and you’re internally motivated to meet it (rather than extrinsic, where you’re adopting goals other people set for you).
Challenging. It needs to stretch you and provide you with a learning opportunity (an easy goal where you don’t learn something new is of less value).
Approach-oriented. The goal is framed positively. “I will study nine hours a week to do well on my final exam,” instead of, “I need to study nine hours a week so I don’t fail the test.”
Flexible. A good goal is not rigid. It’s responsive to feedback.
Harmonious. You are likely working on multiple goals simultaneously (academic, personal, family, work, fitness, etc.). You don’t want these goals to be in conflict.
An overambitious fitness goal (“I will work out a minimum of seven hours a week”) may impede your progress in an academic goal (“I need to study a minimum of four hours a week to succeed in my course”). If you choose goals that complement each other, you are more likely to succeed at them.
2. Create a Workable Schedule
Once you’ve set your goals, you need to plan how you’ll accomplish your work.
Chart your semester.
This is when you lay out the big picture, logging deadlines, commitments, and recurring activities.
It’s important here to map out the different areas of your life — academic, work, and personal — in one master plan. By doing so, you can anticipate when conflicts may arise and make adjustments.
Plan weekly — and daily — to manage time and energy.
As you get started, you can set aside time at the start of each week to review your schedule and plan in more detail.
Consider, too, taking stock each day. Be mindful of the ebbs and flows of your attention and awareness. When are you most productive? Perhaps the morning is the ideal time to accomplish focused tasks, and the evening is best reserved for creative activities.
Learn from what works, and adjust your schedule as often as needed to achieve good results.
3. Evaluate Your Priorities
As you plan, you’ll likely need to evaluate your priorities periodically. The Eisenhower Matrix can help you identify your most critical and important tasks. That way, when new demands arise, you can quickly assess them and shield your schedule from competing priorities.
In the case of Harvard Extension School students, folding in academic pursuits often means carefully assessing priorities.
Harvard Extension School alum Allison Ullrich says she carefully considered the extra responsibilities she was taking on, including assessing what required prioritization.
“When you realize the level of additional time and commitment those capacities take, for me, it was about sitting down and making it very real,” she says. “In order to make this program very enjoyable, it was about culling out what needed to stay, and putting some other things on pause.”
Another HES alum, Theresa Knapp, pursued her degree while working full time, taking care of her two young children, and engaging in community activities. Knapp advises reviewing the syllabus for each course you take to gain insight into the workload ahead.
To acknowledge the balance between life and academic achievement, HES students carry an oil lamp during commencement each year. The lamp, also part of the School’s shield, represents learning in the evening (prior to electricity) and is emblematic of the “midnight oil” students burn to complete their degrees.
4. Work smarter. Not harder.
If you’re a chronic multi-tasker, try to break the habit. Research suggests we reduce our productivity by as much as 40 percent when we split our attention between many tasks. Find ways to focus on one task at a time.
While pursuing your studies, a key part of working smarter, not harder is finding a strong support system.
“Surrounding yourself with cheerleaders is important also — or at least not naysayers,” says Knapp.
5. Celebrate your achievements.
Managing so many competing commitments is intense. Be sure to set aside time to acknowledge your hard work, rest — and reward yourself. This is the fuel that will keep you on the path toward achieving your ultimate goals.
For many Harvard Extension School students, completing courses inspires a lifelong love of learning and contributes to career success.
The summer after he completed his HES degree, Don Parker applied and was accepted to a public policy program at Stanford. He then applied to a public choice program at George Mason University and is now currently pursuing a one-year program at Notre Dame on education reform.
“It’s the Harvard brand that opens eyes and causes people to pause and give your application a second look. And for me, it’s opened up many opportunities to continue to do learning at a very high level with a very select group of people on topics that are interesting,” he says. “I’m not afraid to get turned down. I’m afraid to stop applying. But those are some of the ones that I’ve been able to get into. And I think the Harvard brand really carries the day for those things.”
Take the leap and find out what’s next for you.
Now, having graduated, all my hard work has paid off — my company promoted me to an expanded strategic management position. This is not because of a credential on paper, but rather because I show up at work in a new way, applying what I learned at Harvard.
Flex Your Planning Muscle
To put Levy’s advice for goal-setting and planning to use, test out our online planning sheet. You’ll identify a goal and map your plan for accomplishing it. Save your plan as PDF for future reference.
