Life-Balance Analysis by Yuchen

The figure below is my life-balance analysis form. The blue represents how much I time I feel I am satisfied or how much I have spent in each area. Consider that I am a full-time student, so I take the work activities in this form as study activities.

As you can see, the work activities and physical activities are my main focuses, followed by cultural activities and family activities. It’s true that I’m millions miles away from homeI’ve spent less time on social, spiritual and intellectual activities.

Things I can do to improve my development in areas that need it.

The spiritual activities were used to be labeled as unimportant and not urgent because I believed in looking forth and never stop. As a result, I spent most of my time on studying and working on my body and living with a pretty busy lifestyle, however I feel it could be more productive if I take some breaks and try the deep-relaxation strategy as mentioned on p.142 in Developing Management Skills which could help me recover from energy loses and unmotivated attitude caused by stresses.

Apart from the psychological buildup, there’s another issue on social aspect that must be solved: my terrible habit of passing the whole day in my room. I was so comfortable in my little comfort zone that I didn’t even want to meet new friends. Moreover, by surfing the internet for everything I needed, I don’t even have to move my feet. It’s pretty ironic that I bought myself a pair of trousers from la Maison Simons a few days ago, but it’s bought from their website instead of their offline store. In order to improve my development in social activities, I should go out and establish new social relationships which could provide opportunities to share one’s frustrations and disappointment, to receive suggestions and encouragement, and to experience emotional bonding (p.143). Perhaps I can start with participating in the activities organized by service de residence.

Things I should stop doing in order to achieve better life balance

The first thing I should stop doing is allowing technology to become my master. Internet and other gadgets are good servants and they were designed to make my life easier, not to rule it. Sometimes they also distract me from productive working, I will open a new browser and surf the internet for a few minutes while knowing that I must focus on my current work. Even though they are just a few minutes of distraction, I know this small loses would cut my thoughts and harm my productivity.

Another thing that should be stopped is the loafing, or procrastinating, to be more precisely. When I feel lack of motivation, I’ll just sit back and wait until the last minute to finish my work. Starting my works until the last two or three days before the deadline is the typical symptom of procrastination, it’ll put too much stress and eventually make people exhausted even have finished the work.

Things I’ll do to practice #2 and #3

I would like to start from today to set up an hour of internet-free time and use it to meditate or self reflect. The time looks quite short but I would like to start with this small win, and consistently doing this.

For my practice of get out and meet new friends, I am planning to visit the Montmorency Fall this week with some new faces, it would be an interesting journey for me and I might find it relaxing and helpful to reduce the stress.