Career balance

There is a lovely little technique called role cake, it will take you minutes to do, but it should start to clearly reveal how much time you are spending on activities that are work / career related versus non-work.

Role cake

Start by thinking about the roles that you have throughout the course of any given week. Examples could include; worker, partner, parent, child, friend, colleague, manager, committee member, volunteer, community member, mentor, sports / music / art / gardener/ writer etc.

Now with each of these roles, stop and think about these 4 ‘What’ questions:-

1. What do you actually do in that role?

2. What do you find rewarding about it?

3. What aspects are annoying about it?

4. What percentage of your energy and time goes into it? AND is this a reflection of how you would like it to be?

I find it helps to visualise this by drawing a circle, and then dividing it up into slices of a cake, with each representing your particular roles.

Draw two circles; one that divides the cake based on the amount of time you currently dedicated to that role and then another circle with the amount of time you would like to ideally have. Looking at them both, you’ll start to see that some slices are significantly larger than others, this may be fine for you but if it isn’t then as a career coach, I can help you to improve your quality of life without having to do anything that is drastic. This is one of many techniques that I use to help you to focus on what is important and re-address your career balance.