We all play multiple roles: professional, parent, partner, friend, community member, and sometimes roles we never quite expected. These roles don’t politely line up and wait their turn. They collide at the same lunch hour, the same bedtime, the same inbox notification. Managing them often feels like trying to keep several spinning plates from crashing at once.

My ability to navigate these roles began long before adulthood. It was a skill I learned from the two different "teams" in my life: my mother's and my father's. What felt like ordinary weekends back then was actually silent training for how I would handle complexity later.

Weekends often found me drifting between a "girly" life and a "nerdy" one. The morning and afternoon were for leisurely pursuits, backed by my mom’s encouragement. This meant dessert hunts for double scopes "New Zealand" ice cream, strolling around malls, and movie time with my girls. While others finished their day trying on new dresses and unzipping shopping bags, I had another destination.

My afternoons and evenings were for a different kind of pursuit, encouraged by my dad. Before driving me home, we would stop at the upper level of the mall, browsing the shelves at Kinokuniya and discovering new, interesting stories together. The quiet hours in those cozy spaces, after a day of fashion and films, taught me to live with multiple roles and to separate signal from noise, the meaningful from the merely distracting. It was an unusual rhythm, but it showed me early on that identities don’t need to compete, they can co-exist.

This dual training taught me that life isn't about choosing one identity over another, it’s about integrating them. I first glimpsed this lesson from my John Robert Powers teachers, right after a tennis game in sixth grade, when they reminded me to prepare my “ammunition” for the new chapter of junior high school, more roles, more to organize. At the time, I didn’t have the words for it. But later, when adulthood layered responsibility upon responsibility, I realized clarity would become my rarest asset.

Why Balance Is a Myth

That realization collided with a cultural message we all know too well: chase any kind of work-life balance. But balance suggests a scale, perfectly even. Real life isn’t so polite. Some seasons tilt toward work, others toward family, others toward health or community. Instead of feeling balanced, most of us end up feeling guilty.

And the data tells us why the “balance” metaphor breaks:

• 77% of professionals report experiencing burnout at work (Deloitte, 2022).
  
  
  
• Nearly half say that stress spills directly into their personal lives.
  
  
  
• In 2019, the World Health Organization classified burnout as an occupational phenomenon, not just a personal failing.
  
  
  

So if you’ve ever felt guilty for “failing at balance,” it’s not you. It’s the framework. Which led me to ask: if balance isn’t the answer, then what is?

Becoming the CEO of Your Own Life

The turning point for me came when I stopped chasing balance and started running my life like a company. Every part of life became a division with its own OKR (Objective Key Result):

• Family Division: Nurture relationships, raise a child, manage our home. OKR: happiness + stability.
  
  
  
• Work Division: Innovate products, policy, and collaboration with teams. OKR: growth + impact.
  
  
  
• Community Division: Mentoring, speaking, nonprofit projects. OKR: contribution.
  
  
  
• Personal Growth Division: Health, learning, creativity. OKR: fulfillment.
  
  
  

Instead of reacting, I began allocating resources, time, energy, and attention, as if every calendar entry were a line item on a board agenda. As Stephen Covey wrote in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Teens, a book my father once handed me: “The key is not to prioritize what’s on your schedule, but to schedule your priorities.” For me, that was the moment I truly stepped into the role of CEO of my own life.

When the System Fails (and How I Recovered)

Of course, no system is bulletproof. One Saturday, three priorities collided: preparing for a next weekly meeting, attending my child’s recital, and drafting a keynote webinar. The old me would’ve spiraled, trying to juggle everything. But the CEO-me had a different toolkit.

I pulled up my “life headquarters” and applied Eisenhower’s Matrix:

• Important but not urgent: The recital. I went.
  
  
  
• Urgent but not important: The keynote draft. Delegated partly to AI and reviewed it later.
  
  
  
• Important and urgent: The next weekly preparation. Rescheduled to Sunday morning, using my iPhone over the weekend to prep the slides.
  
  
  

It wasn’t flawless, but the system bent without breaking. And that flexibility was the proof I needed: the point isn’t perfection, it’s resilience.

Lifelong Learning, Not Overnight Success

This system wasn’t born overnight. It started with a confusing book I couldn’t fully grasp in elementary school, and deepened through endless weekends at bookstores when others rushed for ice cream. It evolved through trial, error, burnout, and recalibration.

Today, the tools look sophisticated, AI assistants, OKR trackers, documented SOPs, but underneath is something simpler: decades of layering lessons, not shortcuts. Work-life integration is not a destination. It’s a lifelong process of learning, refining, and adapting. Some days the company runs smoothly. Other days, systems crash. Both are part of the growth.

My System in Action

To make it practical, here’s the backbone of the “company” I run daily:

• Capture Everything: iPhone screen capture, folder to iCloud, and double backup to Google, Obsidian, and Notion.
  
  
  
• Organize by Actionability: Projects, Areas, Resources, Archive using Chatbox apps.
  
  
  
• SOPs for Repeating Work: Document once on Google Docs, repeat forever via WhatsApp.
  
  
  
• AI as COO: Chatbots, OKR bots, content helpers.
  
  
  
• Daily & Weekly Rhythms: Morning stand-ups, Friday reviews.
  
  
  

These are just tools, but tools only matter when they’re in service of direction.

The Final Question

Your life is already a company. You have divisions, stakeholders, deadlines, and budgets of time and energy. The only question is: are you running it with the clarity, resilience, and vision of a CEO, or are you winging it day by day?

Life is never perfect, but like choosing a good outfit, it can be managed with intention. Seeing what you wear for today mindfully. That’s a relief worth holding onto. At the very least, we all have the option to run life thoughtfully, productively, and most importantly, happily.

Source:

Covey, S. (n.d.). The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Teens.

Deloitte. (2022). The Deloitte Global 2022 Gen Z and Millennial Survey.

Eisenhower, D. D. (n.d.). Eisenhower Matrix.

World Health Organization (WHO). (2019). Burn-out an 'occupational phenomenon': International Classification of Diseases.

Published on Digilearn Portal:

https://mydigilearn.id/article/17069/our-life-is-already-a-company-but-are-we-running-it-like-a-ceo