Work/Life Balance: The One Tool You Need This Year
Do you often feel as if your life revolves around work? You wake up early to get ready and rush out of the house to get to work on time. Often, you stay late in the office to work on some last-minute projects or tie up a few loose ends. Then you battle traffic to get home, where you eat, veg out in front of the television (if there’s time or energy for that), prepare for the next day, and collapse in bed. Only to get up and do it all over the next day.
Has anyone else noticed how technology has made it even harder to leave work at work? It’s now so much easier to work when you’re supposed to be off. There’s always a critical email that requires your input or an emergency that just has to be dealt with right this minute. If you dare to protest the intrusion into your personal time, you’re gaslit and made to feel like a poor team player who lacks dedication to the mission/job and is just plain lazy.
So you suck it up, overlook your loss of free time, put in a bit more energy, stay a little later, and focus more on your work, to the detriment of everything else.
Working is supposed to help you afford the life you want to live. Instead, your life revolves around your work. You don’t have the time or the energy to focus on anything else. Making a living shouldn’t mean giving up all other aspects of your life.
So when is enough, enough? How do you stop work from pushing out everything else in your life? How do you prioritize your life?
Work/Life Balance: Fact or Fiction?
Were you one of those kids whose parents were always at work? Your parents weren’t really involved in your life because they were always busy working. While you may have understood they were working hard to provide for you and your siblings, it wasn’t something you particularly enjoyed. It was simply a part of life. No amount of complaining was going to change it.
Balancing work and life has been a mystery that many generations have struggled to solve. This has led many of us to wonder if it’s possible to have a perfect balance of work and life, giving equal attention to both.
Let’s face it, it’s not. Attempting to split the 24 hours given you each day evenly between your job and your life will only lead to frustration. The balance between the two needs to be fluid, varying depending on the responsibilities and challenges you face on either side. Sometimes, your life will need the extra focus, and other times your work will.
The right work/life balance best suitable for you depends on your priorities and your life. The key is to not allow work to overshadow your life. That only leads to high stress and eventual burnout. Besides, who wants to get to the end of their life, only to regret spending so much of it working? I don’t know about you, but I’ve met no one who at the end of their life wished they had spent more time working instead of living a full life.
Both life and work are important, and success in one affects the other. Sacrificing your life for your work will ultimately negatively affect your work. No matter what stage you are in your career, you need to learn how to achieve and maintain work/life balance.
Let’s look at some tips to help improve your work/life balance.
How To Improve Work/Life Balance
1. When You’re at Work, Be At Work
We waste a LOT of time at work. Even the most dedicated people cannot dare say they spend the entire time they’re at work actually working. We take personal calls, browse on the office internet, gossip with colleagues, and do many other time-wasting activities.
Imagine how much work we could get done or how much faster we could get our work done if we actually did the work? Maybe that report, which usually takes an entire day to complete, would be finished in a few hours if you didn’t stop to gossip about your brown-nosing colleague. If personal calls and chats did not distract you throughout the day, perhaps you could focus better on your deliverables and finish earlier.
And bosses/supervisors, instead of in-person meetings, why not try sending an email? Also, try easing up on the micromanaging. It’s stressful for you and irritating to the rest of us.
When you’re at work, be at work so you can spend the extra time on things that matter to you.
2. Learn How to Unplug
For many of us, we’ve been running on all four cylinders for so long that rest and relaxation feel foreign. We struggle to unplug from work. When we’re supposed to be focusing on life, we’re checking our emails multiple times, micromanaging our team members, making a quick call to the office, or jolting out of bed, certain something has gone wrong at the office.
All that anxiety can’t be good for your blood pressure.
Have you ever wondered what would happen if you couldn’t go to work? Let’s say you had an emergency and just couldn’t make it to work. What’s the worst thing that could happen if you didn’t check your email again, remind fully grown (and intelligent) adults to do their job for the millionth time, or make that call to check up on the office? Will the office collapse without your super vigilance?
If your office falls apart without you, something is wrong.
If you’re a leader, then it’s time to reconsider your management tactics. As a leader, you should build other leaders who can lead when you’re not there or who can lead other departments. You’re not helping them or yourself by keeping them dependent on you. The first step to building up your team members is learning how to unplug and leaving them to do their work.
Put a plan in place that will keep catastrophes at bay, or at least managed until you get into work to resolve them. Don’t take work home with you.
3. Take Your Vacations
There is no reason you should not take your vacation time each year. Your job needs you, you say? Well, so do your family, your personal goals, and your mental health.
If the time for your vacation is absolutely inconvenient for your job, then you can choose to move it. But that still doesn’t mean you shouldn’t take it. Rest rejuvenates your mind and your body.
Sometimes the reason people refuse to use their vacation time year after year is because they’ve done something shady. If they take time off, chances are high that someone will expose what they’re trying to keep a secret.
Enforced vacation period for the workforce benefits not only the employees but also the organization.
4. Set Work Boundaries and Hours
If you work a shift job, this will be a little easier for you. But if you have a clear start time but hazy finish time, setting this boundary will take a bit of time and finesse. It’ll take some time because everyone has become accustomed to you working long hours. Finesse because if your entire office works long hours, you may end up looking lazy and uncommitted.
I’ve worked in organizations that stated the closing time for staff but with a clause. Staff were to stay behind in the office “if there’s work to be done” or “until the work is finished.” How much do you want to bet that there was always work to be done, or that work never finished? I knew there was a problem when one of my bosses announced to the entire office that I liked to leave work early. Mind you, early was after 6 PM and I started work before 8 AM. But everyone in the office stayed (pretending to work but really just avoiding driving home in traffic) much longer than I did.
I had to decide what was more important, my sleep and rest, or giving a false impression to a boss I really didn’t like? My body decided for me when I started dozing off while driving home from work. It was now a life or death matter and I chose life.
Set work boundaries so you have time to recuperate and rest. This is especially true for people who work from home. Just because your office is at home does not mean you need to be available 24 hours a day.
5. Organize Your Schedule
If you have repeatedly felt as if you’re forgetting something, it’s time to get organized. Organization can help bring order to the chaos that is your life and help reduce some of the anxiety you have. Write down all your work and home commitments and schedule them on your calendar.
You could try a digital calendar that allows you to set reminders. There are bullet journals that allow you more liberty to design and create your journal as you wish. If you’re big on DIY, then that might be a good option for you.
But don’t wait until you get a fancy journal or go looking for a complicated digital calendar. Just take a small piece of paper and write all you need to get done today. Cross off each item as you accomplish it. This ensures you forget nothing and feel pretty good about yourself as you progress through your list.
You can write your to-do list at the end of work each day or right before you go to sleep at night or on Sunday as you prepare for the week.
Achieving work/life balance may seem like a dream for some of us. If you work in a high-pressure industry, where it’s always go, go, go, it won’t be easy to concentrate on your life when work is moving at the speed of light. If you work in a toxic environment where you are guilt-tripped for things like taking a full hour to eat lunch, it will be difficult to stop feeling bad for focusing on your life.
When work impacts your health and your relationships negatively, you need to reassess your priorities. Remember, work is supposed to enable you to live the life you want to live. It is not supposed to take over your life.
