Struggling to juggle work and life?

For a long time, I thought that “having my life together” meant that everything would just be going well all the time – work would be amazing, my home would be tidy, I would be eating well, and I wouldn’t be stressed! Turns out that’s not very realistic. 🥲

In reality, stuff is always going to get dropped. And you will feel guilty for dropping things. But maturing is going from just letting things slip and feeling stressed to making a conscious choice about what to drop.

One thing a lot of people I’ve worked with have struggled with is thinking about “work” as one big block and “life” as another big block. (You see it in phrases like “work-life balance.”) The danger of this is that if both aren’t going quite right, you start to feel like you’re failing at everything.

Instead of two big blocks, think about all your tasks as balls you have to juggle: send the project update to the stakeholders, review your colleague’s powerpoint, book your doctor’s appointment, go to the supermarket, return those pants, reply to that text, pay your water bill, update the calendar invite… the list goes on!

The balls you’re juggling are either glass or plastic. Glass balls are the ones you shouldn’t drop, because if you do then there are some pretty serious consequences. But plastic ones are just more of an “oh well” – it’d have been nice to keep them up in the air, but there’s no real harm.

Only you can identify which balls are glass. And it might change week to week – something that wasn’t that important can suddenly become a big deal, or you might be able to divide up your glass ball into lots of smaller plastic balls.

Identifying glass vs plastic doesn’t make you magically capable of doing more at once, but it means you can start to be intentional about what’s getting dropped.

This week’s post was inspired by this post I saw while wasting time on Instagram – pretty unrelated to the usual yarn content I get recommended, but I really liked the way it was framed.

What do you think of the glass vs plastic way of categorising tasks? 🤔