Money, family and getting your priorities right

When multitasking might seem downright impossible, taking a step back to reexamine why you do what you do may be in order.

Money is important, of course, but there's always more to the story. Otherwise, no one would ever quit a good job to focus on something else that matters more to them.

Knowing why you work can have a great impact on how you perform in your career.

The problem with going about work for the wrong reasons, or for no reason at all other than money, is that eventually many people will end up making bad choices, with no idea how they ended up on the wrong path.

Here are a few areas in which it's important to take stock of why you work before you veer off course:

ETHICS

Some people who've made choices that put a desire for money over their values have learned in the end that this is a path to destruction.

Many of the worst examples who have made the headlines have one thing in common: A deception starts small, and then grows and grows.

Bernie Madoff did not steal billions of dollars in one day. However, after that first shady transaction, one wrong move turned into an avalanche of bad choices that led to a jail cell for him and ruin for others.

What drove Madoff's behavior can be equally true of a worker who's caught with his or her hand in the cash register. When bad choices catch up with you, you will wonder how things got so out of hand.

Despite temptation, it is possible to maintain a career that's founded in honest values. By drawing certain boundaries, when the moral dilemmas come — and they always do — it's much easier to already know where you stand.

BALANCE

Promoting yourself is vital when you run a small company. Oftentimes, that conflicts with obligations at home.

I was happy to get an invite recently to appear on a Fox Business Network show to offer my analysis on why a high-level exec had quit Apple.

Insta-problem: that day was my daughter's birthday. Could I make it to the studio and back home in time? It became clear that I could not do both. The irony was that, like many people, a key career motivator for me is to provide a good example and a good life for my children.

I caught a break that day — the show's producers arranged for me to do my segment at a TV studio closer to my home. But if they hadn't been able to, I would have faced a dilemma workers everywhere struggle with every day.

Cathie Black, the chairwoman of Hearst Magazines, once gave me great advice.

"Even if you're ambitious, it's not a crime to leave at 5:30 on some days. You'll be a better, more effective employee if you have a satisfying personal life," Black said.

We work, in part, for our kids, yet sometimes we allow our work to become a priority over our kids.

While we want to give our children the best of everything, it's important to remember that sometimes the best you can give them is you.