For Every Action There is An Equal and Opposite Reaction

I’m not sure why Newton’s third law of motion popped into my head just recently. It may be because I’ve been reading a series of books written by author Mitch Albom. He’s published several but the one I’ve found to be most interesting was Tuesdays with Morrie. In it Mitch discusses the idea of tension. The tension being the struggle we face to keep our lives balanced. For example, your business may be going gangbusters but then your personal life seems non-existent. Or business is slow so you have time for personal development. There’s a tug-of-war between striking the right amount of balance. It seems as though when one area of life is cruising along nicely there’s always something else taking a back seat.

I often discuss with my coaching clients the importance of setting goals, creating a plan and taking action everyday to realize a dream. On this journey many find themselves grappling with issues of balance. One trainer expressed to me just recently how they earned ten thousand dollars in revenue in one month but it almost killed them doing it. They worked all the time and had no life outside of work. While she increased her financial gain she decreased her quality of life to achieve it. As per Newton’s law, for every action there is an equal an opposite reaction and she experienced this first hand.

So how do you minimize this affect? First understand that the law is the law and you can not break it. What you can do is reduce its affect on your life by understanding how to use it to your advantage. Say you want to earn more in your business. It’s reasonable to assume that in order to achieve this goal you will have to increase the amount of time working to achieve this outcome. With this increase in work input, comes a decrease somewhere else. Your task is to figure out ahead of time where the decrease will happen while still maintaining quality of life.  What will you have to give up, shift or change in order to make room to work on this goal?

Here’s an example to illustrate my point. Say you would like to increase revenues from $2000 to $3000 a month.

Action: You intend to offer a new boot camp program.

Analyses: Your input is the amount of time you will spend putting together the new program and marketing it. Your likely work input for this project will be 10-15 hours a week for the first three weeks.

The time spent to action this goal will cause a decrease in output somewhere else. Perhaps it’s the amount of time spent training clients, searching for new business, family time or personal time. The output time being decreased is equal to your work input. Given this realization what are you going to cut out or cut down in your work week and what will be the consequence of this decrease?

It’s important to take note of where in your business or personal life changes will occur when you have an increase in work input. If you can recognize what may be knocked out of balance then you can set a plan to mitigate any long term affect. In addition, you can decide if the extra input is worthy of your effort based on what you need to decrease in order to achieve it. If you decide that the effort isn’t worth the decrease in time because other areas will undermine your quality of life or success in your business then you may choose to change the goal or the plan.

There’s really no easy way to maintain balance. Your awareness of how these opposites work in your life will help you to control just how out-of-wack you allow yourself to become.  The goal, of course is stay teetering somewhere in the middle and not allow yourself to tip too far in one direction. By bringing your awareness to the work input/work output model you will be able to manage your time better and keep greater balance.