Tag Archive: quality of life

Flipping Work Life Balance

work-life-flip.jpgBigg Success is life on your own terms. There are five elements of bigg success – money, time, growth, work and play. Today we want to focus on play, along with a heavy dose of time and work.

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icon for podpress  Hear George & Mary-Lynn discuss flippin' life on The Bigg Success Show! Click the purple player to listen while you read: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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Work – life (im)balance

We were talking about how we schedule ourselves. Work then play. If you’re like us, work – life balance means work and work and work and work. Life gets the remains.

We’ve told you before that this is one of the things we struggle with the most. We’re entrepreneurs; we love our work. Most of the time it feels like play. But it’s still important to live a full life.

We got to thinking – if bigg success is life on our own terms, maybe it’s counter-productive to schedule ourselves the way we do. Perhaps we could have a higher quality of life by doing things differently.

We realize that this won’t apply to everybody. However, it’s worth everyone’s time to think about what we’re about to say. We feel that it works particularly well for business owners and others who have more control of their time.

Flip work – life balance to life – work balance

So here’s our bigg idea …

Financial planners will tell you that, when it comes to managing your finances, you should “pay yourself first.” Our thought is that, when it comes to managing your work – life balance, you should “play yourself first!”

Instead of work – life balance, let’s make it life – work balance. Flip it 180 degrees.

Put life first. We call it flippin’ life. Go ahead … say it with some attitude. It’s fun!

Think about how you schedule your time. If you’re like us, we always put work appointments and tasks on our calendars. But we don’t always schedule our personal time.

So here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to stop scheduling all of our work first and then fitting our personal lives around it. We’re going to schedule our play time first and then work around that! We’re flippin’ life!

We encourage you to join us. Let’s schedule our days, weeks and months so we put the right first things first.

Let’s flip it!

Let’s place health before wealth. Let’s focus on getting healthier. Making sure we eat properly. There are days when we get so caught up in our work that we forget to eat. It’s dinner time and we still haven’t had breakfast! No more!

We’ll also make sure we get that exercise we need. We’ll get plenty of sleep. We’ll nourish our minds and souls as well.

Flip it.

Let’s position people before profit. Let’s make relationship-building a priority. We’ll plan time with our family and friends. We’ll schedule time to meet new people. Sure this may help us at work as well, but that’s not our goal. We’re focused on the people, not the payoff.

Flip it.

Let’s put experiences before earnings. We want to have experiences, perhaps in synergy (the bigg idea behind bigg success) with improving our health and building relationships, which allow us to live a full life. Through these experiences, we’ll discover new things about ourselves and our world.

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Is this just a pipe dream?

We can hear you now. You think we’re flippin’ crazy!

We say, “Flippin’ no!”

Honestly, we don’t know if this will work. However, we’re going to give it our best shot because we have a suspicion …

By scheduling our play first, we’ll be more focused at work because we’ll have to be!

We’ll have to get just as much done, but we’ll have less time to do it. However, we think we’ll be even more productive. Why, you ask?

We think we will play more because we scheduled it first.

No flippin’ duh, you say. Okay, we understand your skepticisim, but here’s where it starts to get good …

We think, because we play more, we will have even more energy for our work when we work.

We also will know more people and have better relationships with the people we know. We’ll be more effective at finding the right people to work with when it’s in everybody’s best interest.

And because we will have more experiences to draw upon, we will find new solutions to old problems.

In short, it’s synergy! There’s that word again! The bigg idea behind bigg success!

If you want to get on board with us, here’s what we suggest …

Get out your Blackberry, your Planner or whatever you use for scheduling. Start making appointments for all those personal things you want to do. Then fit work into the remaining time instead of the other way around. You’re flippin’ life!

Putting life first. What a flippin’ concept! That’s definitely life on your own terms. That’s bigg success!

What do you think of this idea? Have you ever considered putting play first?

Share that with us by leaving a comment below, calling us at 888.455.BIGG (2444) or e-mailing us at bigginfo@biggsuccess.com.

Thanks so flippin’ much for reading our flippin’ post today! There’s it out of our flippin’ (oops) system now.

If you’re a business owner, there’s one cost-cutting measure that really costs you. Please join us next time when we discuss it. Until then, here’s to your bigg success!

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Direct link to The Bigg Success Show audio file:
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Related posts

Why Work Life Balance Doesn’t Work

Mixing Work and Play

Taking Time Off to Get More Done

Want to be a Millionaire? Here’s How to Think Like One

saleCNN Money recently asked forty people for the best advice they ever got about money. One of the people featured is Bill Nygren, the great manager of the Oakmark Select Fund.

He refers to an episode of the Johnny Carson show, where Johnny asked financial guru Andrew Tobias how someone with only $1,000 should invest it. Andrew Tobias said they should buy non-perishable items.

The crowd got quite a kick out of that answer!

Here was this great financial mind suggesting that people, with only a small amount of money, buy common, every day items instead of investing it.

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icon for podpress  Hear George & Mary-Lynn discuss today's topic on The Bigg Success Show! Click the purple play button: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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Saving money beats making money

There’s incredible wisdom in his answer. After all, whether we save money or invest it, we end up with more money. In fact, we end up with more, by saving it, because we don’t pay taxes on what we save; we only pay taxes on what we earn.

So if we save $100, we’ll be ahead by $100. If we earn $100 and we’re in the 25% tax bracket, we’ll only be ahead by $75.

Trading time for money

We all face tradeoffs. One of those is saving money by spending time or vice versa. For example, we often eat out to save time. But eating out costs more money than buying the groceries and cooking for ourselves.

Thinking like an investor, we have to ask ourselves how we’re spending that time. If it’s not productive – if it’s not saving us more money or making us more money – we might as well spend that time dining in.

Of course, it’s not just about money. We do understand quality of life! We just had to throw this in here to let you know we are human!

Weighing now vs. later

Another trade-off we have to consider is now vs. later. If we spend money today, we won’t have it tomorrow. But instead of spending it today, we could invest it. If we do that, we’ll have more money tomorrow (the original money plus whatever we earn on our investment).

Every outlay is an investment

Taking the advice Tobias gave, if I can save enough on the non-perishables I buy, it may be worth it to buy them now so I don’t have to pay more tomorrow. It’s just like investing the money now to have a greater amount later.

Millionaires get this concept

In his great book, The Millionaire Mind, Thomas Stanley talks about how millionaires spend their money. Of course, they invest. But millionaires are also very frugal.  Some examples that Stanley points out are:

  • They tend to buy used cars. New cars depreciate too quickly for millionaires.
  • They buy couture clothes, but usually buy them second-hand. They want the quality, but know they will pay much less this way.
  • In what you might think is a contradiction to these previous two, they buy high quality furniture, which tend to go up in value.

So you know you’re thinking like a millionaire when you’re looking at every dollar you spend as an investment. Are you getting the return you want?
 

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Subscribe to the Bigg Success Weekly – it’s FREE!

Next time, we’ll talk about getting ahead by getting out. Until then, here’s to your bigg success!

Subscribe to The Bigg Success Show in iTunes. 

Subscribe to the Bigg Success feed.

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