I have been clearing out my house…drawers, closets, cupboards and trying to keep only those things that I need to go forward. My husband and I are now officially empty nesters with my youngest entering university last fall. We realize we have way too much “stuff” for our new family of two.

As I was cleaning out a drawer last weekend I stumbled across a booklet I had kept, “The Busy Woman’s Survival Guide,” written by Paula Peisner, which was published in 1992. I expect I kept it because I realized my life was very busy, but never found the time to actually read it to help me ‘make time for myself and others’ as the sub-title reads. I had a look through to see if this should hit the garbage or if I still needed to have a read.

The booklet provided very practical advice to ‘slow down the treadmill’ by managing expectations, learning to say no, making your family more self-sufficient, prioritizing, scheduling personal time and lots of other tips for taking control of your own time schedule.

As I skimmed through the book I quickly realized that not all that much has changed since 1992. Women are still struggling with this “work-life balance” that seems to keep alluding us.

A couple of weeks ago I had the privilege of attending Ontario Power Generation’s emPOWERed Women’s Forum. They had a number of great speakers who touched on the whole work-life balance issue. A couple of points really stood out.

Deborah Gillis, Senior Vice President, Membership & Global Operations, at Catalyst, said “it wasn’t realistic to talk about balance.” Balance was about being effective in all parts of your life and you should strive for balance over a time period like a month, not everyday. She suggested that balance was about always being there for the most important things in your life. In other words be where you need to be, when you need to be there. So if that means missing a meeting at work because your child’s concert is that day, miss the meeting. If you have to stay at work to get that project completed on time, stay and don’t feel guilty about missing time with your family. After all, you were there last week when it really counted for your child. This approach makes sense to me. You can’t balance life everyday, but you can balance it over a period of time and give your best to your employer, your family or your social groups when it is most important.

Another speaker, Meg Soper, a great comedian who really puts life into perspective in a very fun way suggested that booking 30 minutes a day into your schedule just for you can make a tremendous difference in your stress levels. Give yourself 30 minutes that are just for you and think about creative ways you can make that work. Maybe stopping on the way home to poke through that little shop you’ve always wanted to go into or driving the long way home to enjoy different scenery works for you. Something that means something to you and you find relaxing and enjoyable. When you think about it we are often 30 minutes later leaving work than we plan and life still goes on. Why not pad the time you drive home at the end of the day with 30 minutes to do something you really want to do? It might not always work at the end of your day but you get the idea.

So think about incorporating the advice from both these intelligent women and start looking at work-life balance differently. Stop trying to find the magic bullet that is going to make your life manageable all of a sudden. Hopefully if we change our idea around perfect work-life balance we won’t still be stressing about the same issue in another 20 years.