The Importance of Taking Time as a Family
Stephen Covey, EdD
Careers today demand more and more time and attention. Even after we leave work, beepers, fax machines, laptop computers, E-mail and cellular phones enable us to bring our offices home.
Result: We struggle to balance our career responsibilities with the time our families need during the week, and on the weekend, too.
How to restore the boundaries and find balance between work and family:
Don't think of family as something to fit around your work schedule. Nearly 80% of people in our research named family as their top priority. Yet in reality, few people ever spend 80% of their home time with their families. This is especially true of young families, in which parents are concentrating on establishing careers.
Important: Put work and family in perspective. Work is important, but so are your spouse and children. When work dominates your life at home, your home becomes a more stressful environment as your family tries to pull your attention away from your work and you try to get everything done.
To make your family a priority, make a commitment to yourself to prioritize them now. Start by changing your assumption that work is nonnegotiable to an assumption that your family is nonnegotiable.
You will find that this one conscious shift of your mind-set opens the door to creative possibilities.
Ask yourself a series of questions:
When was the last time you spent a solid hour playing with your children or reading to them?
When was the last time you had a long, uninterrupted conversation with your spouse?
Imagine that it is 20 years from now and you are looking back on this time. Would you regret anything about the time you spent with your family? Would you wish you could relive this time so you could do things differently?
When you truly commit to making your family more of a priority, you learn to draw a line between your work and your home life and you become careful about crossing that line.
Ask your family how family time can be more rewarding. Once you've made a commitment to prioritizing family, you need a guiding plan to help you put that commitment into action.
To make that plan effective, you need input from all family members.
Three-step strategy:
Schedule a block of time during which your family can meet, perhaps on a weekend. State your commitment to your family, and ask for feedback. Note their answers. Helpful questions:
What kinds of things do we want to do together?
What can I do for each one of you individually?
What types of things do we want to turn into weekly, monthly or yearly rituals?
Review your notes, and start developing your overall family plan right after the meeting. This will become the basis of an evolving document that will be revised and fine-tuned as you spend more time with your family.
Put some of your family plan into action immediately. Begin with simple things based on your family members' unique wishes, such as tucking a child into bed each night and telling a story or never reading the paper at the dinner table.
Even such small actions will make a huge difference.
Stephen Covey is author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Families (Golden Books)
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