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Project Management in a World of Overload

In this chapter, you learn why having work-life balance is vital to project managers who seek long and prosperous careers, and you discover the importance of learning project management fundamentals. In later chapters, you’ll see that when all is said and done, people skills are every bit as vital.

Success, to What End?

What is the value of being successful in your career, rising in your organization, earning ever more salary, and generating praise from many corners, if you don’t have a sense of work-life balance? More pointedly, as a project manager, what is the value of bringing projects in on time, at the desired quality level, and on budget; being recognized as highly effective; getting promoted; and looking forward to long-term career success—if you do not achieve work-life balance?

Are you truly successful if each day is a battle? Do you have to drag yourself out of bed, make it through the morning slog, find your way to your desk, and begin again on what seems like an endless series of tasks without a break? Is that a life worth pursuing, deserving of emulation, and the one you sought when you were climbing up through the ranks?

It might seem unusual in a book on project management to first discuss the notion of work-life balance. Yet, to be a successful project manager for the long haul, you need to experience work-life balance on a semirecurring basis. Why only semirecurring? Because nobody lives a life of sustained work-life balance, day in and day out. While you can battle through your current project and maybe the next one as well, despite being out of balance, you actually seek long-term career success. So, this otherwise unusual first chapter will prove beneficial.

A Short Quiz

Here is a multiple-choice quiz question: Which word best describes today’s typical project manager?

◾  Overworked

◾  Underworked

◾  Energetic

◾  Lazy

The appropriate answer could well be “None of the above.” Powerful social forces have the potential to turn each of us into human whirlwinds, charging about in “fast forward” mode. Work, time away from work, and everything in between appear as if they are part of an unending, ever-lengthening to-do list, to be handled during days that race by quickly.

The World as We Found It

To say that career professionals in general, and project managers in particular, work too many hours, and that too much work lies at the root of any time pressure they feel and the leisure they might indulge in, is to miss the convergence of larger, more fundamental issues. It’s everything else competing for our attention on top of our workload that leaves us feeling overwhelmed. Once we are overwhelmed, the feeling of being overworked quickly follows.

Nearly every aspect of society has become more complex since the year 2000. Traveling is becoming more cumbersome. Learning new ways to increase productivity takes its toll. Merely participating as a functioning member of society guarantees that your day, week, month, year, and even life, along with your physical, emotional, and spiritual energy, will easily be depleted without standing at the proper vantage point from which to approach each day and conduct your life.

Do you personally know anyone who works for a living who consistently has unscheduled, free stretches? Five factors, or “mega-realities,” are simultaneously contributing to the perceptual and actual erosion of our leisure time, including

◾  Population growth

◾  The information tidal wave

◾  Mass media growth and electronic addiction

◾  The paper trail culture

◾  An overabundance of choices

1. Population

From the beginning of creation to 1804 CE, world population grew to one billion. It grew to two billion by 1927, three billion by 1959, four billion by 1974, five billion by 1987, six billion by 1999, and seven billion by 2011, according to United Nation sources, with eight billion en route. In less than five years, the equivalent of the current population of the United States, 330,000,000 people, will be added to the planet.

The world of your childhood is gone, forever. The present is crowded and becoming more so. Each day, world population (births minus deaths) increases by roughly 200,000 people, based on Worldometers calculations. Independent of what type of project you’re managing or are about to manage, and regardless of your political, religious, or economic views, the unrelenting growth in human population permeates and dominates every aspect of the planet and its resources, the environment, and nearly all living things. This is a compelling, yet under-acknowledged aspect of our existence, and in a moment I will link them to the four other mega-realities.

More densely packed urban areas have resulted, predictably, in a gridlock of the nation’s transportation systems. It is taking you longer merely to drive a few blocks; it’s not your imagination, it’s not the day of the week or the season, and it’s not going to subside soon. Population and road use grow faster than our ability to repair highways, bridges, and arteries.

City planners see no clear solution to gridlock on the horizon, and population studies reveal that metropolitan areas worldwide will become home to an even greater percentage of their countries’ population. Cities large and small will face unending traffic dilemmas.

The Impact on You—How does ever-increasing population affect your career and your life? Increasingly, it might make sense to live closer to where you work, because commuting in each direction could prove to be burdensome. It also can be helpful to telecommute more often, so that you don’t have to go into the office or visit the project site every day. You can rely more heavily on the tools that we all have in our homes now, including phone, e-mail, texting, logging onto the Internet, and in some cases faxing.

Because your project team could be geographically far-flung, you don’t meet with them in person on a regular basis, if at all.You could be among those who are geographically distant from the individuals to whom you report. You connect via cyberspace, relying perhaps ever more so on video apps such as WhatsApp or Zoom.

Indeed, sometimes our project team is geographically far-flung because of talent considerations and the desire to keep costs down. If the talent we seek is overseas, and yet can do the job effectively within the budget we’ve allotted, then by and large that’s whom we hire and with whom we work. In many respects, the acceleration of both world population and the “gig economy” are inextricably linked.

You likely already know much of the above, but have you stopped to consider how you could have more-impactful interactions with your geographically dispersed team members or with stakeholders? We’ll keep focused on communication issues throughout the text. In particular, Chapter 13, “Reporting Results,” focuses on the issues addressed above.

2. The Information Tidal Wave

Many project managers fear that they are under-informed while, paradoxically, being bombarded by information. Over-information wreaks havoc on the receptive capacities of the unwary. The volume of new knowledge broadcast and published in every field is enormous and exceeds anyone’s ability to keep pace. All told, more words are published or broadcast in a day than you could comfortably digest in your lifetime.

Increasingly, there is no body of knowledge that everyone can be expected to know. In its 140th year, for example, the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, D.C., added some 942,000 items to its collections. With more information comes more misinformation. Annually, more than 40,000 scientific journals publish over one million new articles.“The number of scientific articles and journals published worldwide is starting to confuse research, overwhelm the quality-control systems of science, encourage fraud, and distort the dissemination of important findings,” the science journalist William J. Broad, of the New York Times, once said.

Too many legislators, regulators, and others entrusted to devise the rules that guide the course of society take shelter in the information over-glut by adding to it. We are saddled with 26-page rules and regulations that often could be stated in far fewer pages. Unfortunately, this phenomenon is not confined to government. Nearly-impossible-to-understand software manuals, insurance policies, car rental agreements, sweepstakes instructions, and frequent flyer bonus plans all contribute to the quandary.

Relying on the Best—Information and communication overload most definitely impacts you, and probably does so every day. You have to function in this world like other career professionals. The channel noise, which surrounds each of us, increases inexorably. Thus, it becomes important for each of us, but particularly project managers, to rely on the very best of information sources.

Tune into the best of news shows, and visit the best of web news sites. Rely on the highest level and most credible information sources as often as you can. Have the mental and emotional strength to tune out peripheral information that may be interesting or nice to know, but that, in perspective, doesn’t support you, your team, the project, your organization, or anything else that’s important to you.

Why are both mental and emotional strength necessary? Mentally, recognizing what’s best left untouched versus what does merit our attention is challenging enough. Then there is the emotional component. Because we want to be complete in our efforts, sometimes, even when we know an issue is probably not significant enough to devote resources to it, we have a hard time walking away, thinking “It would be so nice to handle that, too.” Thus, having only the mental strength, or the emotional strength, often is not enough—you need both.

The strength to let go, particularly in the area of information and communication, will become a skill that you’ll want to cultivate and more finely tune as you proceed up the ranks of project management. Why? Project managers, as a breed, tend to be over-achievers if not perfectionists. They want to take care of everything, be on top of it all, and display their prowess, but sometimes that is the path to costly errors, needless diversions, and, on a personal basis, potentially even burnout.

Letting go is often synonymous with abandoning erroneous notions that you harbor. Subconsciously, you could be thinking that if you don’t do absolutely “everything” on the project, you’ll be harshly judged. People will think you aren’t up to the task. Or, you know in your own mind that with a little more effort, you could have included everything! You develop an emotional attachment, unknowingly, to small issues. The risk of this kind of attachment is that you’re not going to finish the project on time—this is not likely to be a useful outcome for anyone!

The Center of It All—A project manager is the nexus for the brunt of the information related to a project. So, it’s critical to have the ability to prioritize information and assess new information’s validity and applicability to the tasks at hand. Project managers are the center of it all: of their bosses, stakeholders, project team members, and perhaps even outside vendors and suppliers—virtually anyone who has a role in the project. Reams of information are directed toward the project manager on a continuing basis, sometimes without a break.

In essence, a project manager has a job-related information overload burden, whether or not it’s written in the job description! The temptation to read every e-mail on which you are CC’d can be overwhelming. The inclination to delve into reports, from cover to cover, that come your way, could haunt you as you realize you simply don’t have the time to peruse every line of every page. Often, you need to rely on summaries, and sometimes you need to merely skim the information you encounter.

Project managers need to be able to walk away from some tasks without engaging them at all. The ability to prioritize and focus on what’s truly important is a vital and emerging skill, for virtually all career professionals, who face a sea of information that is unending. Upper management seeks out such individuals, those who know how to fend for themselves amid so much competing for their attention.

As projects are completed, time passes, and you find yourself assuming more responsibility, the strength to prioritize, weed out, and let go will serve you well. If you begin to develop such skills now, it will be to your great benefit for the many years and even decades ahead.

3. Media Growth

The effect of the mass media on our lives is incalculable. Worldwide media coverage certainly yields benefits. Democracy has a chance to spring forth when oppressed people see or learn about how other people in free societies live. As we spend more hours tuned to electronic media, we are exposed to tens of thousands of messages and images.

To capture overstimulated and distracted viewers, television and other news media increasingly rely on sensationalism. Like too much food at once, too much data, in any form, isn’t easily consumed. You can’t afford to pay homage to everybody else’s 15 minutes of fame. As the late Neil Postman observed, in Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Television, with the three words “and now this …” television news can hold your attention while shifting gears 180 degrees.

With a planet approaching eight billion people, media outlets are furnished with an endless supply of turmoil for mass transmission. Such turmoil is packaged daily for the evening news, whose credo has become “If it bleeds, it leads.” We are lured with images of crashes, hostages, and natural disasters. Literally, more people die annually from choking on food than in plane crashes or by guns, but crashes and shootings make for great footage and play into people’s fears.

The Need for Selectivity—With its sensationalized trivia, the mass media over-glut obscures fundamental issues that do merit concern, such as preserving the environment. Meanwhile, broadcasts themselves imply that it is uncivil not to tune into the daily news—“All the news you need to know,” and “We won’t keep you waiting for the latest….” It is not immoral to not “keep up” with the news that is offered. However, to “tune out”—to turn your back on the world in favor of your current project—is not a great solution. Being more selective in where you offer attention, and for how long, makes more sense.

Being more selective is no small feat in an area where you can subscribe to Dish or DirecTV and have up to 400 channels beamed to you via satellite. You can subscribe to various online programming, a variety of Amazon or Netflix services, AT&T U-verse, or other such systems where so many programs and channels can be offered that it’s impossible to keep pace.

The obvious solution is to select the handful of channels and programming that best suit your needs and, again, have the strength to let go of the rest. While the amount of programming available exceeds 20,000 hours a week, no one has that kind of time. You only have 168 hours.

Tomorrow, while dressing for work, rather than plugging into the mass media, quietly envision how you would like your day to be and how you would like your project to proceed. Envision meeting and talking with others, making key decisions, having lunch, finishing tasks, achieving milestones, and departing in the late afternoon or early evening. You’ll experience a greater sense of control over project issues that you might have considered too challenging. (See Chapter 4, “What Makes a Good Project Manager?”)

There is only one party who controls the volume and frequency of information to which you’re exposed. That person is you. Each of us needs to vigilantly guard against being deluded with excess data. Otherwise, you run the risk of being overwhelmed by “the latest” issue, and feeling overwhelmed can exacerbate feeling overworked.

4. Paper, Paper

“Paper, paper everywhere, but not a thought to think.” Similar to too much information, or too many eyewitness reports, having too much paper to deal with is going to make you feel overwhelmed and overworked. Yet, the long-held prediction of paperless offices, for now, is a hoot.

The Thoreau Society reported that Henry David Thoreau, who personally has been unable to make any purchases since 1862, received 90 direct mail solicitations at Walden Pond during a recent year. Under U.S. postal rates, catalog publishers and junk mail producers can miss the target in 98% of the attempts and still make a profit—it has been widely observed that only 2% of recipients need to place an order for a direct mailer to score big.

Attempting to contain what seems unmanageable, our institutions create paper accounting systems that provide temporary relief and some semblance of order, while actually becoming more ingrained and immovable, thus creating more muddle.

Maybe One Day—Of the five mega-realities, only paper flow promises to diminish one day as virtual reality, e-books, and online capabilities expand. For the foreseeable future, if you’re not careful, you could be swamped with paper, even if you employ sophisticated project management software (see Chapter 11,“Choosing Project Management Software”). It’s essential to clear the in-boxes of your mind and your desk.

For now, even in this age of voluminous e-communications, paper plagues a preponderance of career professionals. The evidence is plain to see: Look around your own office. How about your desk? Are stacks of paper, often stapled or in file folders, piling up? How about on top of filing cabinets and around the corners of your room?

What about the offices of folks surrounding you?

If paper everywhere and anywhere were not an issue for most people, they would have clear and clean desks, tables, and flat surfaces. Generally, they do not. So, be on alert. Regard each piece of paper as a potential mutineer. Among those sheets with merit and worth saving, electronically scan and file all that you comfortably can. Recycle the rest dispassionately. Each sheet has to earn its keep and remain worthy of your retention.

5. An Overabundance of Choices

In 1969, Alvin Toffler predicted that we would be overwhelmed by too many choices. He said that an overabundance of choices would inhibit action, result in greater anxiety, and trigger the perception of less freedom and less time. Half a century later, we can see and feel that he was right. Having choices is a blessing of a free market economy. For project managers, having too many choices often leads to the feeling of being overwhelmed and can result not only in increased time expenditure but also in a mounting form of exhaustion.

Consider the supermarket glut: Gorman’s New Product News reports that in 1978 the typical supermarket carried 11,767 items. By 1987, that figure had risen to an astounding 24,531 items—more than double in nine years. Grocery stores in 2018, according to Market Watch, carry 40,000 more items than they did in the 1990s.

Elsewhere in the market, Hallmark offers cards for no fewer than 105 familial relationships. More than 1,260 varieties of shampoo are on the market. Some 2,000 skin care products are available. Even 75 various types of exercise shoes are available, each with scores of variations in style and features. A New York Times article reported that buying leisure-time goods has become a stressful, overwhelming experience.

Choosing to Be—Periodically, the sweetest descision you’ll have to make might be choosing from what you already have. Choosing to actually have what you’ve already chosen. Choosing to be on your current project. Choosing to work with your project team members. Choosing to tap the potential of your project resources. (See Chapter 7, “Assembling Your Plan.”)

Even more important is to avoid engaging in low-level decisions. If a tennis racquet comes with either a black or a brown handle, and it’s no concern to you, take the one closest to you. When you catch yourself about to make a low-level decision, consider: Will this make a difference? Develop the habit of making fewer decisions each day—the ones that count.

At first, you might feel a bit queasy not making all the decisions related to your project. Happily, this feeling will pass. As you gain more confidence in your project team members, you can rely on them to make lower-level decisions, thereby freeing you to concentrate on the higher-level decisions. In addition, you will likely be a bit gentler with yourself as you begin to realize that letting some of the small issues go will not adversely affect the project, your management capability, or anything else of note.

No Let-up—The rate and volume of change that you encounter on the project, within your organization, and in your personal life are not likely to decline. As we proceed into this brave new world, if anything, you’ll encounter more choices with which to contend, not fewer. Thus, you’ll need to establish a viable framework for relatively quickly assessing what merits your contemplation and what does not.

The winners in the world of project management understand the importance of focusing on the higher-priority issues. They are aware that spreading themselves too thin can be as risky as not being diligent on those issues that do merit their attention. This is, of course, a fine line. Those who become adept at project management learn how to traverse it. Those who don’t make it to the finish line, or who do but get close to burnout, are often among those folks who feel they have to stay on top of every little thing. This is insidious. Let go. Trust yourself. You’ll be okay!

Overwhelmed and Underserved

In a Time Magazine cover story years back, titled “Drowsy America,” the director of Stanford University’s sleep center concluded that “Most Americans no longer know what it feels like to be fully alert.” The phenomenon is now global. Lacking a balance between work and play, between responsibility and respite, we find that simply “getting things done” becomes an end-all: We function like human doings instead of human beings.

We begin to link executing the items on our growing “to-do” lists with feelings of self-worth. As the list grows longer, the lingering sense of having more to handle infiltrates our sense of self-acceptance. The world itself seems to be irrevocably headed toward a new epoch of human existence. However, is being frantic any way to exist as a society? To manage a project? To run your life?

We appear poised to accommodate a frenzied, time-pressured existence, as if this is the way it has to be and always has been. Our ticket to living and working at a comfortable pace is not to accommodate a way of being that doesn’t support us, but rather to address the true nature of the problem head on. The combined effect of the five mega-realities will continue to accelerate the feeling of pressure.

The positive news is that the key to forging a more peaceful existence can occur for you. You are whole and complete right now, and you can achieve balance in your life. You are not your position. You are not your tasks. You have the capacity to acknowledge that your life is finite; you can’t indiscriminately take in the daily deluge that our culture heaps on each of us and expect to feel anything but overwhelmed.

Balance Begins with the Basics

Viewed from 20 years from now, today will appear as a period of relative calm and stability when life moved at a manageable pace. On a deeply felt personal level, recognize that from now on, you will face an ever-increasing array of items competing for your attention, both on the current project and off it.

Each of the five mega-realities will proliferate in the next decade. You can’t handle everything, nor is the attempt to do so worthwhile. It’s time to make compassionate, though difficult, choices about what is best ignored versus what does merit your attention and action

Work campaigns come and go. Trying times happen. Stretches occur when we have to flat out give our all, maybe to the detriment of other aspects of our life. Such times pass. Concurrently, we need to acknowledge that a life of balance supports people and their careers. Work-life balance includes the basics: good sleep (see below) every night, good nutrition daily, and exercise at least three or four times a week.

Pay heed to these basics so you can be effective on the current project as well as for the long haul as a project manager. Why? Project management is not for the meek. At times it can be taxing. If just anybody could handle it, then many more people would. Thankfully, starting from where you are, you can be effective as a project manager, even if you’re on your first project, and still experience work-life balance.

The Quest for Work-Life Balance

What, exactly, is work-life balance? Compared to the legions of instances in which the term is cited, surprisingly little has been written in articles and books about what the concept actually entails.

As the trademark holder and only person recognized by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office as “The Work-Life Balance Expert®,” I regard work-life balance as the ability to experience a sense of control and to stay productive and competitive at work, while maintaining a happy, healthy home life with sufficient leisure. It requires attaining focus and awareness, despite seemingly endless tasks and activities competing for your time and attention.

Work-life balance entails having some breathing space for yourself each day; feeling a sense of accomplishment, while not being consumed by work; and having an enjoyable domestic life without short-changing career obligations. It is rooted in whatever fulfillment means to you within 24-hour days, seven-day weeks, and however many years you have left.

Several disciplines support work-life balance, though individually none are synonymous with it:

◾  Self-Management

◾  Time Management

◾  Stress Management

◾  Change Management

◾  Technology Management

◾  Leisure Management

1. Self-Management

Sufficiently managing one’s self can be challenging, particularly in getting the aforementioned proper sleep, exercise, and nutrition. Self-management is the recognition that effectively using the hours allotted to us in our lives is vital, and that life, time, and available resources are finite. It means becoming captain of our own ship: No one is necessarily coming to steer for us.

Self-management is the overarching discipline to all six elements of work-life balance. Unless you’re able to successfully manage yourself, how can you manage others, let alone the intricacies of a project? Self-management starts with the basics but then extends to working productively throughout the day, taking periodic breaks, and recognizing which tasks you can best tackle at which times, so you can stay productive nearly all day long.

2. Time Management

Time management is a term that has been in vogue for more than 100 years, although the essence of time management today has changed: Clearly, most people no longer work in factories. Nor do many office workers constantly engage in repetitive tasks. Today, labor and service workers aside, nearly all other workers are knowledge workers in some way or another, as are most or all of your project team members. Tasks change every other day, if not daily. New challenges arise. Often, on-the-spot decisions need to be made.

Effective time management involves making optimal use of your day and summoning all available supporting resources, because you can only keep pace when your resources match your challenges. Time management is enhanced by creating appropriate goals and discerning what is both important and urgent versus what is important or urgent. It involves understanding what you do best, and when you do it best, and assembling the appropriate tools to accomplish specific tasks.

Many of the project management tasks we tackle are first-time in nature (to us), and so we might not know the actual time needed to complete them. Spending your time effectively means ranking the tasks before you, in order of importance, and then tackling the first one to completion, if possible, before going on to the second task.

3. Stress Management

By their nature, societies tend to become more complex over time. In the face of increasing complexity, stress on the individual is inevitable. Some stress is useful and beneficial, and often that is not the type of stress we even notice. It’s what we do notice—the kind of stress that impedes us in some way—that requires some attention.

Stress management is a crucial skill in our rush-rush society, where seemingly few moments are available to take a breath. Independent of one’s individual circumstances, more people, more noise, and more distractions require many of us to become more adept at maintaining tranquility and at being able to work ourselves out of pressure-filled situations. Many forms of multitasking can increase our stress, while focusing on one thing at a time helps decrease stress.

Without tending to your mental, emotional, and physical needs, stress is predictable. Techniques for counteracting stress include meditation, yoga, vigorous exercise, visualization, and even aromatherapy, among dozens of other methods.

4. Change Management

Managing change is why project managers are hired: In one form or another, each of us is hired or retained to manage change. In today’s fast-paced world, change is virtually the only constant. Continually adopting new methods and adapting old methods are vital to achieving a successful career and having a happy home life. Effective change management involves offering periodic and concentrated efforts, so that the volume and rate of change both at work and at home do not overwhelm or defeat you.

Resistance is bound to emerge. People cling to how they’ve been proceeding even if it’s no longer a viable alternative. If you can adapt on the fly, and be effective even as the “rules” change, you will become more valuable to your organization. Forthcoming chapters touch on how to be nimble as unforeseen changes occur.

5. Technology Management

Effectively managing technology requires ensuring that technology serves you rather than confounds you. Technology has long been with us, since the first walking stick, spear, flint, and wheel. Today, the rate of technological change is accelerating exponentially, brought on by vendors who seek to expand the market share for their products or services. Often, as in the case of highly touted project management tools, you have little choice but to keep up with the technological “Joneses.” Still, you rule technology. Don’t let it rule you.

Here are some effective ways to become more technologically adept, without giving up your identity or your life in the process: Each week, learn one new presentation or communication tool, particularly those that are already part of existing software packages that you use. Read at least one article a week related to communication or presentation technology. The article can be in a PC magazine, a business journal, or your local newspaper. Once a month, read a book related to technology. Again, be easy on yourself by picking up books that put technology into perspective in an understandable, friendly way.

Managing technology is vexing to some and old hat to others. I suggest that technology novices team up with technology pros to have an effective reciprocal exchange. Haves help have-nots with technology, and veterans help newbies with insights, observations, and hard-won industry wisdom.

6. Leisure Management

Managing leisure is the last but certainly not least vital discipline. The most overlooked of the work-life balance supporting disciplines, leisure management acknowledges the importance of rest and relaxation—that one can’t shortchange leisure, and that “time off” is a vital component of the human experience. Curiously, too much of the same leisure activity, however enjoyable, can lead to monotony. Thus, effective leisure management requires varying one’s activities.

While we need leisure on a regular basis, many people force-fit leisure between two periods of frenzied activity. True leisure means the ability to wind down, disconnect, and mentally, if not physically, go someplace else that is not connected to work and unrelated to the current project. At least weekly, usually on the weekend, we could use some leisure. Periodically, we need whole vacations that depart from our routines.

Your key to having sufficient leisure all along is learning that you don’t need to stay at work longer each day. Indeed, to reclaim your day, you can’t stay longer. Your quest is to accomplish what you seek to accomplish within the eight-or nine-hour workday. Then, have life for the rest of the day.

A Brave New World

As we move into the brave new world of ever-accelerating flows of information and communication, the quest for project managers to achieve work-life balance on a regular and continuing basis will be increasingly difficult, yet it’s a challenge that’s entirely worth pursuing. We owe it to ourselves, to our families, to our project team, and to our organization as a whole to achieve work-life balance.

A world that consists of human “doings”—not human beings—scurrying about to get things done, with no sense of breathing space, is not a place where you or I would likely want to live. I don’t want to be part of a culture of overwhelmed individuals who can’t manage their own spaces or the spaces common to everyone. I prefer not to live in a society, or a world, of time-pressed people who have nothing left to leave for future generations. My guess is that you don’t, either.

Eight-hour workdays, 250 days a year, yield a work year of 2,000 hours. Nine-hour works days add up to 2,250 hours. Can you accomplish your projects in 2,000 to 2,250 hours? Yes! Thousands of hours, eight to nine hours, even a single hour, is a great deal of time—if you have the focus, the quiet, and the tools.

Achieving work-life balance doesn’t require radical changes in what you do. It’s about developing fresh perspectives and sensible, actionable solutions that are appropriate for you. It means fully engaging in work and life with what you have, right where you are, smack dab in the ever-changing dynamics of your personal and professional responsibilities.

Make it a choice—Tell yourself, “I choose to live in a society composed of people leading balanced lives, with rewarding careers, happy home lives, and enough space to enjoy themselves.”

◾  ◾  ◾

For much of the world, the pace of life will speed up even more. Among project managers, the future will belong to those who steadfastly choose to maintain control of their lives and control of their projects, effectively draw on their resourcefulness and imagination, and help others to do the same.