Elizabeth Grace Saunders has a great post about respecting yourself and taking back control of your calendar. This is so simple, yet so difficult for most people to accomplish. Taking control of your calendar is critical to any hopes of accomplishing work-life balance. As I mentioned in a previous post, it's really about choices.
My guess is most people regularly fail at Elizabeth's first tactic to taking back control of their calendar... saying 'no' early and often. If you blindly aim to please everyone all the time, your name tag will read: 'Doormat.' Not long after that, you'll be handed a new name tag: 'Burnout.' Is your calendar routinely booked solid with meetings, many of which are duplicative or unnecessary? Do you end up working well into the evening or on weekends just to get your own work done because you spent all day in meetings? Think about saying no.
I also love Elizabeth's second tactic... balance structured and unstructured work. In the past, I've purposely blocked times off my calendar to accomplish both. If I had a hard deadline to meet or I really wanted to get to that project that had been put off for months, I'd block off my calendar and put some semblance of control back where it belonged: with me. I'm a big believer that we all need some excess capacity built into our schedules. Not only does this provide flexibility, but it helps remove loads of avoidable pressure.
If you want others to respect you (and your time), you need to respect yourself first. Start by taking control of your calendar.
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