Look at the long range.  Define what “a successful life” is to you, personally.  Try to separate what success means for you from what you think other people expect of you.  At the end of your life, what do you want people to say about you?  There is nothing intrinsically wrong with wanting to be remembered simply as a good father, a dedicated employee, a funny woman, a patient teacher…or as a world-class entrepreneur, a philanthropist, an Olympic medalist, or President of the U.S.  Being a success is really about meeting your own goals and high expectations, not someone else’s. Your definition of success may be pretty different from your next-door neighbor’s or your brother’s. 

After you determine the long-range view, you must make short-range choices….you may not really be able to have it all, or at least not all at once!  Especially in the United States, we are bombarded daily, if not hourly, with messages that imply that we are failures if we don’t at least TRY to have it all.  We are supposed to be able to be perfect employees (but also climbing up the corporate ladder), loving parents (but also perfectly adjusted parenting experts), and active in our places of worship and other communities (but not at the expense of work or family).  There’s simply too much to do! 

Something in your over-crowded, over-committed life has to give.   So take a step back.  Determine what the non-negotiables are for you, and then realize that anything else can be adjusted if necessary.  Wouldn’t you rather choose what you want and need most right now (in light of what success means to you as a whole) and act on it than stand the chance of losing something important because you just couldn’t handle everything? 

Balance doesn’t necessarily mean equal time on every activity.  Quality time almost always trumps quantity time.  You most likely need to invest a significant part of your day in working, but that doesn’t mean that the few hours each day with your family can’t have just as much (or greater) impact. Make all of your hours spent at work as productive as you can:  eliminate time-wasters, prioritize your schedule, delegate non-essential tasks, and so on.  And when you are home, put work out of your mind.  Focus on your significant other, your children, your community, and your hobbies as closely as you focused on your work while you were on the job…make the fewer hours count just as much.

Pay attention to your habits and your mindset.  Do you habitually arrive at work at 8:00 but stay until 6:30, drive a half-hour home, barely in time to see your young children to bed?  What if you changed your habit to arrive at work at 7:30, reduce your lunch to a half-hour, then leave work at 5:30?  You’ve won an hour in the evening with your family, without sacrificing work productivity.  Do you answer every email you receive within five minutes?  What if you started checking email only three times per day?  How much time would you save because you’re not interrupting yourself constantly?

Turn your choices into goals. Set goals that correlate to the things that matter most to you.  If at this time in your life, building your retirement account is your first priority, you must make that into a specific, measurable goal.  For example:  I wish to retire early at age 60, and I need to own my home and have a monthly income of $2,500 in order to be comfortable on retirement.  This goal is specific:  knowing that you need $2,500 per month and that you can’t have a house payment to make ends meet gives you a very specific objective for saving each month and paying down your mortgage each month.

What if your goal is to work on your marriage?  Setting a specific goal such as “I will attend counseling with my spouse” at least once per week for the next month will help you hold yourself accountable for doing the things that really matter to you.

Remember:  Your goals don’t have to be financial.  Success is measured by many other yardsticks in this world!

Be "planful."  You know your life is busy, and you know you have a lot of pressures on your time.  You can’t afford NOT to be careful about how your time is spent and where you choose to invest it.  It sounds simple, but there are a lot of people out there who don’t keep an effective calendar!  If you know your daughter has a soccer match at 5:00 Thursday evening, put it in your calendar.  And don’t forget to write in the sales call you just scheduled for late Thursday afternoon.  Oops!  That’s going to be cutting it close.  Could you have scheduled the sales call for earlier in the day, or Friday morning?  We’re not saying that you need to schedule every hour of every day - but being aware of how events and priorities interact in your life, and planning your days with enough cushioning, will save you stress and will certainly help you balance your life.

Work is about achievement, but other parts of your life don’t need to be.  And work should be about what you can achieve based on your own previous best.  Competition against other people in any part of your life usually is just not productive.  Who’s going to care that the Joneses have a BMW 7-Series parked in the driveway, but you have a Buick?  Does it change who you are as a person?  Does it make you less valuable? 

Focus on the conversation you are having, the activity that you’re doing, or the call you are making, right now.  Focus purely and deeply on that conversation, activity, or task.  Then turn it off, and focus on the next thing, and so on.  This is a gift that the most effective salespeople seem to have naturally.  When they are with customers, their customers feel they have the salesperson’s whole attention.  When they are with their friends, their friends feel the same way.  If you can truly focus your whole being and all of your energy on each task that you’ve set out for yourself, not only will you perform better at the tasks, but you’ll likely be more efficient at them…which will earn you time in another area of your life.

Look at your life as having phases. What is most important now may not be as important 10 years from now, or 30 years from now.  Concentrate on this phase, right now.  What does your life require of you, and what do you require of it?  Perhaps now your life requires dedicating overtime to work.  At another point, it may require attending to an ailing parent, or being able to spend quality time with your family.  Re-evaluate your situation regularly.  Where are you investing your time?  Where are you spending time that would be more rewarding if spent elsewhere?

Take care of your physical self – manage your stress and indulge your sense of humor.  If your physical self is out of balance, your life will likely follow suit.  Regular exercise, a healthy diet, and rewarding interpersonal relationships will make you less prone to stress and anxiety and give you more positive energy to put into the things that matter to you.  Be sure you laugh daily - remember to find the humor in life.