Balancing Your Roles Learning Goals

The following worksheet will ask you to reflect on the current “roles” you have in your life and evaluate the current versus ideal level of time, attention, and effort you put into each one. The goal of this worksheet to help you visualize the difference between your current and ideal role balance and to identify areas needing adjustment.

Good to Know

As you reflect, evaluate, visualize, and identify, keep in mind:

Looks can be deceiving. Just because someone looks like they have a great work/life balance (or even a better one than you), it just might not be the case. You shouldn’t look to others to judge yourself and how you are managing your time.

No one maintains balance all the time. While it would be great to have a life perfectly in balance, it just doesn’t happen that way. It’s okay to move between your current and your ideal because it means you know how to make adjustments.

Not everyone’s looks the same. It’s important to remember that there is no “right way” to balance the roles in your life. Your roles are a unique combination of you, and as such, no one else’s is going to look the way yours does.

Values and priorities matter. The time, effort, and attention you are giving to each of your roles should align with your values. The way you decide to spend that time, effort, and attention should be prioritize according to those values.

Be kind to yourself. If one day or week or month doesn’t go as planned, it doesn’t mean that you need to be beat up on yourself. Balancing all of your different roles is hard. You can always try again.

Instructions

In the first column, list out all of your life roles (person, student, worker, spouse, child, sibling, friend, citizen, volunteer, worshipper, activist, among others) that take up a significant amount of time (more than five hours a week), attention, and effort. In the second column, estimate your current amount of time (as a percent) in that role. In the third column, estimate your ideal amount of time (as a percent) in that role. Finally, using this chart, complete the reflection questions.

Visualization

Role

Current Level

Ideal Level

prayer

100

100

worshipper

100

100

sibling

100

100

wife

100

100

student

100

100

worker

100

100

6000= 100%

6000= 100%

Reflect, Identify, Evaluate

Are all the roles that you listed necessary? How so? Do they contribute to your long-term goals? Do they fulfill you personally, academically, and/or professionally? Do they help you to be successful in other areas?

Are there any roles missing from your list? Which ones? Why are you missing them? Why are they important to have? What steps can you take to create these roles in your life?

What was the area(s) where there was the largest gap between the current level of time, attention, and effort? Why do you think this gap exists? What steps can you take to close the gap between the current and the ideal?

What was the area(s) where there was the smallest gap between the current level of time, attention, and effort? Why do you think you are closer to your ideal level here? What steps can you take to ensure that you maintain this balance?

Overall, what do you notice by visualizing your current and ideal role balance? How does this exercise help you to target these areas? Now that you know more about where you specifically need help, what resources do you need? What knowledge and skills might help you to balance these? Where can you receive these?