What do an entrepreneur, a healthy checking account, your diet and a tightrope walker have in common? They all need balance to be most effective! Balance is a word that you hear a lot about, but you may not know how to achieve it in your own life.

Entrepreneurs, by their very nature, tend to focus on creating business, which means being immersed in work, sometimes to detriment of health, family, and other aspects of life. It's easy to get out of balance and takes some effort to maintain it, once you've got it, but it's effort worth expending. Having a balanced life pays off in terms of profitability, professional effectiveness, physical health, and personal fulfillment.

If you're not sure how to tell, here are six clues that your life may be out of balance:

* You rarely eat meals with your spouse/family.

* You regularly work late into night.

* You don't get as much accomplished as you'd like to at work.

* You wake up tired.

* You can't remember your last two days off in a row.

* You feel out of shape and/or sluggish much of time.

* You feel burned out or depressed.

Do you know difference between planning and scheduling? Planning is deciding WHAT needs to be done and scheduling is deciding WHEN to do it. Planning without scheduling is nothing more than listing a lot of things that never get accomplished, and you can?t schedule tasks that you haven?t decided to do, so two go hand in hand.

Planning is done with a master list. The master list contains tasks, large and small, short range and long range, in no particular order. Your master list is merely a place to write down all things you want to do ?sometime?. It?s a general place to keep an inventory of all things you?d like to complete so you don?t have to store them all in your head.