Living Work-Life Balance

So it's been a few months since you heard from me.  Rest assured it's not because I've been sipping iced tea on some remote beach.  Since May my family and I have done the following:

• Put our house on the market that we lived in since 1993
  
• Sold and closed on said house
  
• Donated/sold most all of our furniture and many other items
  
• Finalized renovations on a new waterfront home

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• Moved from our existing home to our waterfront home
  
• Furnished waterfront home
  
• Coordinated business and personal address changes

• Hosted family members in celebration of our son's high school graduation
• Traveled to New York to celebrate his graduation
• Purchased and learned how to drive and dock a boat (and learned lesson #1 - only go as fast as you want to crash into something J)
• Replaced the transmission on one of our vehicles (OK so I paid someone to do it)

So I tell you all this not to bore you with my personal life details, but rather to talk with you about living and breathing work-life balance.  In April my wife and I were looking at all of the things we were needing to get done over the summer and realized that it was going to be a VERY busy time with lots of moving parts and things which couldn't fall through the cracks.  I decided that for me to be most effective I needed to put a few things on a back burner until we got through the summer.  Writing my One Nugget Report to you as my readers was one of the things that was sacrificed.  I really didn't want to stop writing for four months but felt that I needed to do so to maintain balance and to minimize my stress level.  When I was younger I would have taken on a superman-like attitude and just muscled through a self-induced overloaded to-do list.  Now that I am less younger, I am much more attentive to how much I take on and strive to keep my to-do list as sane as possible.

I tell you all this to underscore the importance of keeping work-life balance in the forefront and doing your level best to keep your stress level down by not biting off more than you can chew.  Sometimes it means tough choices.  Sometimes it means disappointing someone.  Sometimes it means having to say "no".  As a recovering workaholic I understand your plight.  But I can also say that when you truly keep balance top of mind your overall happiness and effectiveness will be positively impacted. 

Be diligent in keeping the balance.  It's worth it.