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Your roles in life

How many roles do you have in life$%: I have at least 8 roles which I have to juggle and separate, when I say separate I mean mentally separate each role. At the moment I am a Father, a husband, a support worker, a coach, a counsellor, a website creator, a blogger, and consultant.

I didn't really take notice of the different roles until a few weeks ago.

Number of pieces:

I usually get up at around 5.30ish and work on the blog or a website. I usually wake my kids up at around 7am. So, 7am comes, I walk upstairs wake them and come back downstairs to cram a few minutes more work. I then shout at the kids for not being ready, or not brushing their teeth after me telling them for the 5th time. I then cram another few minutes in. At around 7.30am I wake my wife up for work or university and then cram another few minutes into work. Then when I know the kids are ready and had breakfast and their lunches have been made I then have a cold shower and get ready for work. I have a cup of tea with my wife and then get the boys ready for going out to school and off we trot at about 8.15am.

So, from 7am until about 8am I have slipped between roles of blogger, website creator, father, husband, and getting ready for support worker; 5 roles in all. What happens is that I get grumpy as hell as sometimes, mentally, I am not finished one role before I slip into another. So I take it out on my family, not realising why I am being a bit grumpy.

What is happening is that I am not mentally finishing one job before trying to go into another job and then not finishing that one before going into another. It's like reading 8 pages of a book, you start one page, don't finish it, go on to the next page, don't finish that one and so on and so forth. Nothing really gets finished. This is mentally frustrating and can cause stress and anger. I hate starting something and not finishing it, even if I don't like the task. I don't like things being left undone.

Due to the blog and a few website commissions coming in I am much busier than normal the past few weeks. It was my wife who pointed out I was being a bit grumpy, which wasn't like me. We spoke about it and nailed it down to the mornings and nailed it down to not being able to concentrate on one role at a time.

A tip for switching between roles

This may seem extremely simple but the trick to switching between roles successfully is two fold:

• Recognise what roles you play in life and note down when you play them

• Set times for changing between the various roles. This has to be a conscious thing. For example if you work in the morning set a time for finishing that work and don't go back to it. I now finish my blogging and website stuff at 7am and am a father and husband until 8.30am; then I am a support worker until 4.45pm then I am a father and husband until about 7pm and then I am a blogger and website creator until about 10pm. Obviously this changes at the weekend and on holidays, as my father and husband roles greatly increase in time.

This has helped me tremendously over the last few weeks, I am a lot calmer, less stressed, and I am getting more things done in life and am procrastinating less.

What I also found useful was to create a pie chart of what roles I play and the percentage I play them. The pie chart shows a typical 120 hour waking week for me. It was interesting to see how much time I spend in different roles. Doing the pie chart a few weeks ago made me realise I needed to spend more time with my family so I rearranged a few hours to make more time for my family. I would like to get rid of the 25% I spend working as a support worker for the homeless, but money dictates. However I like my job but spreading the 25% around some of the other roles would be great.

What roles do you have in life$%:

Why not create a pie chart like the one above or simply note down the percentages of each different role. I think you will be surprised at the number of hours spent in each role; it may let you look at life in a new way. If you do work out the percentages why not post them and I will create an overall pie chart for everyone.