Work-Life Balance Is a Cycle, Not an Achievement

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2. Pay attention to your emotions.

留意你的情绪变化

Once you’ve increased your awareness of your current situation, examine how that situation makes you feel. Ask yourself, do I feel energized, fulfilled, satisfied? Or do I feel angry, resentful (气愤的，厌恶的), sad? For example, one respondent (应答者，调查对象) described his realization that his current work-life balance (or lack thereof) was engendering (产生，造成) some pretty negative emotions:

“You feel resentful and bitter that something that fundamentally isn’t that important to the essence of life is stripping valuable time and minutes away from you … it’s accentuated (加重) even more when you see someone who has lost their life or someone who has been told here’s how much time remains on your clock.” (Tobias, Audits Director)

A rational understanding of the decisions and priorities driving your life is important, but equally important is emotional reflexivity — that is, the capacity to recognize how a situation is making you feel. Awareness of your emotional state is essential in order to determine the changes you want to make in your work and in your life.

3. Reprioritize (变更优先顺序).

Increasing your cognitive and emotional awareness gives you the tools you need to put things into perspective and determine how your priorities need to be adjusted. Ask yourself: What am I willing to sacrifice, and for how long? If I have been prioritizing work over family, for example, why do I feel that it is important to prioritize my life in this way? Is it really necessary? Is it really inevitable? What regrets do I already have, and what will I regret if I continue along my current path?

Our priorities often shift faster than our day-to-day time allocation habits. The interviewees that described a more positive work-life balance intentionally reprioritized how they spent their time in a way that lined up (对准，排列整齐) with their true priorities. One participant described how he still saw himself as a professional, but redefined that professional role to be more inclusive (包含) of other valued roles, such as that of parent:

“The more I really understand what’s important in life — and it’s not really work — it’s, you know, understanding the relative importance of work. I still get a lot of satisfaction and stuff from work, but it used to be everything to me, and now it’s less than half to me.” (Dan, Audits Director)

See you tomorrow