More often than not when you are caught in the whirl of your professional life and find it tough to keep up with the pace of your personal life,you need to take a step back. Yes,that’s the simple solution.

Take. A. Step. Back.

Sometimes plans go awry and bad habits creep in and taking a break to tinker your life back into shape is a beneficial move.

Intermittent evaluation of goals to track progress is essential to determine the relevance of your goals.Sometimes you may have started something that may have lost relevance due to the changing times. Introspection would help you pinpoint the necessity of continuing/ discontinuing activities not aligned to your goals.

For example,recently I got involved in a lot of different activities which seemingly drained my energy and motivation to execute my most important goals. I decided to use the Urgency-Important Matrix to help me organize myself better. I realized that I was spending a lot of time on reading too many books. I have decided to divide time between reading the different books and to not exceed the stipulated times/limit.

Example :not reading more than 20 pages per day per book would not reduce the time I need to spend on critical activities.

Remember this: Introspection sometimes requires a sane outside voice you can trust. One should never hesitate to reach out to the expert to get an additional point of view that can add a new angle to your outlook.

If things go out of control,you’ve just got to follow the advice you might have learnt in school to put out fire (if your body is aflame):

STOP,DROP and ROLL

The clarity and calmness you get will help you declutter.