How To Balance Everything In Your Life
By: Lydia Jones
Tags: Productivity, Prioritization, Side Hustle, Burnout, Work Life Balance

If you’re anything like me, you have an obsession with trying to get your life together, but you’re not quite there yet. You’re juggling a job, school, family, a side hustle, hobbies, a social life, emotional and mental health, and probably even more.

Maybe you seem like you have it all together, but you KNOW that you’re way too close to losing your balance in life. Or, maybe you look and feel like a hot mess. Don’t worry, I’m not here to judge.

What you really want is to TRULY have your life together, whatever that means to you. Being on top of things has a lot of benefits to your life and how you feel, such as:

Having more time

Feeling confident and prepared

Being ahead on tasks

The ability to relax

Less tiredness and anxiety

Time for whatever makes YOU happy

Being more present

Sound good? You want to get (and keep!) your life together. But how?

Getting your life together and making time for everything you want to do requires two simple things.

Just Two Steps!

Knowing what you want to do with your time, AKA priorities Planning the CRAP out of that time so that it serves those priorities

I’m here to present a ton of tips and tricks to make all of that happen for you!

If you’d like to follow along with a free worksheet, get access to my free resource library here.

Determining your priorities

Determining your priorities in terms of how you want to spend your time is something you should assess frequently. I like to do this using categories / areas of life, for example:

Finances

Relationships

Friends

Family

Fun and relaxation

Self-care

Housekeeping tasks

Spirituality / religion

School

Work

Side hustle

Health and fitness

Mental and emotional health

I write down the categories that are relevant to me and then assess them based on the following questions:

How fulfilled is each area currently?

You can write this on a scale of 1–10 or 1–5, you can rate it as “great,” “good,” “ok,” or “bad,” you can simply give it a check or an x based on whether you feel it’s a priority or not — whatever works for you.

Just make sure you think about how you feel about each area of your life. Do you feel stressed about it, or prepared and calm? Do you wish you spent more or less time in this area?

What are your goals in order to increase that fulfillment?

Everyone has totally different goals for each area, with varying levels of effort and time required to achieve them. Your goals can be big or small. Just make sure your goals are SMART: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound.

How are you going to take action to achieve those goals?

“A goal without a plan is just a wish.” Now that you know what your goals are, it’s time to focus on the how.

Make a plan of action of exactly how you can achieve those goals. For example, one of my goals right now is to stay on top of my work and studying in math class.

The steps I am taking to achieve this goal require consistency, as this is more of a habit than a goal — math class isn’t really going to end until I graduate.

In order to take action to stay on top of everything for math class, I’m going to study concepts before we go over them in class, and practice more for concepts that I don’t understand.

Making time for your priorities

Now that you’ve reverse engineered your goals into tasks, the secret to getting all of those to-do’s done is to plan the heck out of your time.

How much time do you need to invest into achieving these goals?

If your goal is something big like taking your side hustle full-time, you might have to make time every day for a few hours in order to achieve it. If your goal is something smaller like improving your meditation skills, this might only take ten minutes a day. If you want to improve your friendships, you might schedule an hour or two a week to meet up with a friend.

Everyone’s goals are totally different. You might work on them for hours a day, ten minutes a day, or even just a few hours a month.

Once you know how much time a task takes and how often to do it, the important part is making time for that.

How will you plan and schedule this time?

Planning your time is the best way to make sure that your schedule reflects your priorities.

There are plenty of ways to schedule your time — you can use a digital calendar or a paper calendar, and you can choose to plan daily, weekly or monthly. You can do a simple or artistic DIY with a bullet journal, or use a planner that guides you through everything.

The important thing is to make sure that the way you spend your time is aligned with your goals. Spend more time, more often, on goals that are very important to you. Keep your priorities a constant presence in your calendar.

There are time trackers and habit trackers that you can use to keep track of what you do to work towards your goals in the areas of life that you prioritize.

Once you get super clear on what matters most to you and what doesn’t, you can start prioritizing your life. Once you turn those priorities into goals and plans, your life will start to look more and more ideal to you.

Quick recap:

Determining your priorities:

What are the categories of my life?

How fulfilled is each area currently?

What are my goals in order to increase that fulfillment?

How am I going to take action to achieve those goals?

Making time for your priorities:

How much time do I need to invest into achieving these goals?

How will I plan and schedule this time?

You can answer all of these questions in a printable worksheet! Just click here to get access to my free resource library.