Ping pong ninja - how to regain your footing when tasks are flying at you

Imagine a ping pong game. You need quick reflexes to get the paddle to meet the ball hurtling toward you to return back to your opponent. The nice thing about a game of ping pong, is that you keep score, it is fun, and it ends.

When life is out of balance it is like a ping pong game that you've been playing for days or weeks that just won't stop. Your attention is fried.... the ball whizzes past you because you failed to be in the right place at the right time. You might even feel like there are a dozen ping pong balls aimed at you all the time. Like a game of dodge ball gone horribly wrong, you just hold the paddle over your face, curl up and try to deflect as many of the round missiles firing in at you as possible.

Multi-tasking is not the answer. Multi-tasking is like closing your eyes, putting a paddle in each hand, and taping one to your forehead. You think you might hit more of the ping pong balls, but in fact, what you are doing isn't more effective. You just flail around more wildly. You exhaust yourself, and likely as not, you look like an idiot to any bystanders watching.

In Life Balance, you stop multi-tasking in that sense, and go back to working with one ping pong ball at a time, you begin to remember that the whole world is still turning under your feet. You remember that there are escape routes - perhaps a door to your left with a water cooler in the lobby beyond. You are no longer trapped in the never ending ping pong game because you have reclaimed perspective. You start to make better decisions about which of the many ping pong balls actually matter. Perhaps you really only need to be concerned about the orange one!

Once you have that cool ninja Life Balance perspective, it is much easier to get back in the game, and to have a lot more fun with all that you do!