How to Set Goals that Balance Your Personal Life with Your Career Development

Summary

This article flips the script on goal setting, suggesting we put personal goals ahead of career goals to find better work-life balance. It dives into why Americans struggle with balance, from perfectionism to technology, and shares simple, actionable steps to help you prioritize what really matters. If you’re ready to rethink how you set goals and want to feel more fulfilled in both life and work, please read on.

By Maria Geokezas, Chief Operating Officer at Heinz Marketing 

If you’re like me, you enjoy the blank slate that a new year offers, with all the promise of setting goals. On the other hand, if you’re like me, you might also want to avoid the stress of failing to achieve the goals as you try to balance your work and home life.

This year I decided to rethink how I was approaching my goal setting, and here’s what I came up with: Instead of focusing on goals for our careers and separately goals for our life, what if we set goals that balance our lives and careers?

How? By putting personal goals first. Why? Because work life balance is a real struggle for Americans. And rethinking our goal setting might help.

American workers lack work life balance

The struggle for work life balance is not new in the U.S., as you might have guessed. However, it might surprise you that the United States ranks 55^th on the list of the top 100 countries for work life balance, according to the Global Work Life Balance Index of 2024. The U.S. has an index score of only 31.82 while the top-ranking countries score significantly higher: New Zealand at 80.76, Ireland at 77.89 and Belgium at 73.45.

So, yes, the lack of balance is widespread.

Whose fault is it anyway?

If you’re thinking this poor work life balance is all the fault of employers, think again. The number one obstacle is our mentality in the U.S. We place a high value on work. Maybe that’s why the number one barrier to work life balance is on us: personal perfectionism.

Changes in technology have made the balance harder to achieve as well. First it was smart phones that made it possible to be available 24/7. Now many people work from home at least part of the time thanks to technologies like Zoom and that can turn into “living at work.”

Combine our “work first” mentality, our own impetus towards personal perfection, and the 24/7 work life enabled by technology, and it’s easy to see that finding balance is hard.

What does poor work life balance look like?

In fact, work life balance might be something you can’t even imagine at this point. So, let’s start with a question: Do you have a good work life balance?

Create some quiet time and space to think about this. For many of us, juggling work and home life means zero downtime to simply be and ponder how well it’s working—or not. We might not even realize just how out of balance it all is.

Look at your current life and decide what—if anything—is out of whack. If you have poor work life balance, you’ll have obvious indicators, like chronic fatigue, grumpiness with your family, time wasted doom scrolling on your phone, weight gain from eating takeout, or simply a mindset of “all I do is work.” Or you might have less obvious indicators only you can recognize.

Granted, balance is different for different people, but if you’re lacking balance, you should be able to see it if you give yourself time and space to consider it.

How to set meaningful goals that achieve work life balance

Once you’ve realized balance is needed, let’s get back to setting goals that will help you achieve better balance while still advancing your career. Here are four steps you can take to do so:

Step 1: Set your personal goals first.

Yes, put yourself first by setting your personal goals first. Your personal goals are whatever you want them to be, from improving your financial management to healthier eating habits to learning Spanish to taking a trip to what have you. Clearly define these.

Then set your career goals, but make them secondary to your personal goals. Why? Because our society emphasizes work and therefore we tend to prioritize it too, for good reason: Work provides tangible feedback. We get paid. We get praise. We get a sense of accomplishment. We get to work with others and enjoy a sense of camaraderie.

In addition, we live in a society in which work “should” come first. That’s the unspoken message we’ve all internalized. Between that and the tangible rewards we get from work, it’s no wonder it’s so easy to lose our balance!

However, if we set our personal goals first and make them the priority, we are more likely to keep that focus on our personal life throughout the year.

So set your personal goals and then your career goals.

Step 2: Choose a plan or method to apply to your goal setting.

The most common method of goal setting seems to be SMART goals. Yet SMART goals aren’t for everyone, so if you’ve tried that method and it didn’t work for you, keep looking. You have plenty of options. For ideas, check out Indeed’s list of 10 different types of goal setting techniques. If you prefer an app to help with goal setting and tracking, a quick online search will give you plenty of options to choose from, ranging from simple to complex and free to subscription-based.

Why do you need a method or app? Because unless your goal is somehow clear, measurable and attainable, you probably won’t achieve it. I can easily say “my goal is to lose 10 pounds this year,” but without a plan for doing it, will I achieve it? Using a method or app makes the goal doable.

Step 3: Apply your plan or method to your personal goals then career goals.

As we said already, plan your personal goals first. If your personal goal is to travel to Spain during August, establish the plan to make that happen. Going on the trip is likely to affect your work because you’ll need the time off, you’ll need to make sure you’re all caught up on any projects before your trip, etc. You might also have to build up more vacation accruals to get the time off or log extra hours to help pay for the trip.

But if you set your work goals first, your trip to Spain might not happen. Maybe a work goal is a promotion and that means you can’t be gone during the summer because you’ll be doing the extra work left behind by vacationing colleagues to prove you deserve the promotion.

Do you see how switching the priority can make all the difference?

Step 4: Accept that you’ll face some opposition.

Not everyone is ready to admit they need work/life balance, and your coworkers might not like what they see when you start setting boundaries on your work time, or you start showing up to work with an energetic attitude. But think of it this way: You’re modeling the new approach. They might not recognize their own need for balance yet, but when they do, they can look to you to see how to do it.

Sure, you’ll struggle with feelings of inadequacies because everyone else is still sending emails at 11:00 p.m. or communicating on Slack while at a bar. And you’ll think you need to stay connected and respond right away because everyone else is doing it and that’s the expectation. But guess what? You don’t. And your coworkers will get used to that, although you will have to get used to it first.

I hope those four steps help you to achieve the balance you seek, for the enrichment of your personal life and the advancement of your career—without a negative impact on your personal life.

But whatever you do, make prioritizing your personal life a constant. Because a mentally and physically healthier you is more likely to advance in your career, and I call that a win-win.

Image by kjpargeter on Freepik.