At home, you seek adequate leisure time to build harmonious and happy relationships with your family, relatives and friends, and to enjoy mutual experiences that lead to happy memories thereof.

At work, you seek to recognize and seize opportunities and strive to advance them to a level where you will attain a sense of satisfactory personal achievement, and also, gain the recognition and appreciation of your colleagues and superiors.

To do all this, be like a scientist, think rationally and logically and avoid tautologies or repetitive/ circular thinking. The example Eliyahu M. Goldratt in ‘The Choice’ gives is of a sentence in a sports paper like, “They lost the game because they did not have the motivation to win. -” The rest of the article does not provide any direct evidence that the team did not have enough motivation. But, we the readers, accept the statement because – “The team lost the game, didn’t they?” This is a tautology, a repetitive/ circular reasoning – where the causality is not substantiated. Most people often resort to such circular logic and hence, they are unable to analyse the circumstances and determine the real root causes of a conflict. To recognize an event that has happened, as something that was meant to happen, is also, a tautology as it is only a demonstration of hindsight. So, stop thinking things are fated or destined to happen.

Destiny is only a probability, depending on your situation, motivation, effort and choice. Right personal choices lead to a happy life with the right Work-life balance is something not properly understood, and is highly over rated. It is not how many hours you spend working, or spend with our family or friends that count, it is the quality of time you spend with them that counts. Choose your work/Job wisely. Work is not work if you enjoy doing and obtain great satisfaction and joy from doing it. Unfortunately, most people seek the security of easy and routine work, where they watch the clock, seeing the work they do as a burden and thus seeking to do less as possible, while calling for more leisure, more holidays and more family time.

Leisure or holiday time is very precious and you would do better to spend it doing meaningful and memorable activities or building meaningful relationships, instead of just demanding more salary and casually passing the time. Again, it is not the hours you spend on each activity that count, it is the quality of the time you spend on each that counts. Your work comes first, (except in an emergency), because that provides you a satisfactory sense of achievement and the means to take care of your family, your family comes next, before your casual friends/colleagues. Always be conscious of the value of the emotional benefits that you get from each hour you spend on your work, or with your family, or your friends. Also note that leisure time is very costly and is a perk added to your wages.

It will be good to list your options and do a ‘pre-mortem’ on each as recommended by Physiologist, Gary Klein. Assume that you have made the choice and that you are now a year or two or more into the future when your choice has become a disaster. You are now looking at the result of the choice from a future perspective. Now analyse the causes that led to your choice going wrong. This will help you avoid wrong choices and help avoid regrets later on. Writing your options and analysing the plus and minus points of each, will be very helpful in understanding the results of said options but finally the choice or decisions still get made on feelings, sensations and thoughts, on what seems right.

Decisions made on comparison of Pro’s and Con’s do not take into account the important ingredient of emotion, which causes you to keep questioning the weighting and importance of each of the factors in the Pro’s and Con’s because the decision derived there from does not suit your emotional choice.

We tend to form opinions very quickly and allow our short – term emotions too much importance in deciding on what to do. To allow for a more rational choice, you need to view your options from a fresh perspective.

Ask yourself that if it was your best friend making the decision how would you advise him/her to decide.

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