Distractions. We’re inundated with them, especially in the smartphone era. There’s always a text message to answer, a startup offering some must-have service to explore, or even just our seemingly endless to-do list, which can cause a normally focused LO to feel as if he or she has an attention deficit challenge.

That’s the nature of life in the 21^st century.

As entrepreneurs, LOs may have a diffcult time separating when they’re at work and when they’re not, especially if you work from a home office. Some ways to keep both work and home life upbeat include restful sleep, regular exercise, a healthy diet, less television (try reading or a creative activity instead), and, of course, a positive attitude.

The challenge isn’t even about balance, according to a new article in Inc. magazine, which posits work/life boundaries as the key to more productive, happier living. Because life doesn’t happen in predictable patterns, neatly segmented into 8-hour chunks for work, sleep, and personal time, trying to “balance” everything is unrealistic, maintains Barrett Cordero.

“Work has deadlines and families have crises and sometimes more time is needed in one area of our life than the other. For example, am I supposed to tell my employees during an important deadline, ‘Sorry, I need to go home for some “me-time” or tell my wife, ‘Sorry, I can’t take our child to the hospital because I need to stay balanced for work’? No, that’s ridiculous.”

Instead, he encourages his employees to “strive to be 100 percent present at work and 100 percent present at home.”

Musings on a Road Trip

Clearly, too many distractions can cause us to miss out on life’s joys. By the same token, failing to plan (because we’re too busy or too distracted) can lead to increased risk. Consider this story from Chronic Care Advocacy president William Fralin, who turns a “distracted adventure” into a teaching moment:

“On a recent Saturday morning, I was up early and reading the newspaper when I noticed an article about a bear festival in a small North Carolina town.

“The article mentioned that you could go on a trip to a nearby national wildlife refuge where there is a large population of black bears. ‘Guaranteed sightings’ they claimed. On a whim, I gathered my family and we made a road trip to the wildlife refuge for no reason other than I like bears and I needed a break.

“Now, mind you, we were totally unprepared for this trip. However, my family, being good scouts, managed to get bug repellant and rain gear packed into the car while I made sandwiches. We brought some sodas for lunch. Yep, everything you need to ward off a hungry black bear that you happen to meet on the trail. Luckily for us (though I was highly disappointed), we did not meet any bears in the woods that Saturday.

“On the way home, I got to thinking about what could have happened if we had run into a bear (a real bear, not a cute ‘Smokey the Bear’ bear). My complete lack of planning and false sense of omnipotence could have turned out very badly for my family.

Fralin went on to explain that, aside from physical safety issues, he realized he’d been distracted from financial safety: his estate plan was more than two decades out of date, and his Will needed to be updated since his mother had passed away.

“Planning for your end of life should not be done on a whim or even done once and then never re-visited,” he says. “Being unprepared for one’s death, one of the few things in life that WILL happen, makes no sense, whether you are a senior or just starting out in life.”

Fralin makes a potent case for why a reverse mortgage, or HELOC, can be precisely the planning wisdom your clients and prospects need to consider now. In our distractable age, focused living, with smart planning, makes the curve balls life tosses our way more bear-able.