The Importance of Prioritizing 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.

 

The next 3 days, we'll look at a Three-step strategy for prioritizing our family time.
 

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