A healthy balance between work and life is what most of us strive for, but it’s easier said than done. In an 'always on' workplace, juggling the demands of career and personal life can be a challenge. The good news is, with a little bit of planning, you can set limits and create time for your personal pursuits to maintain a good balance. Here are four steps to prevent this from happening.
organize your work and prioritize your time:
Being organized with your work helps you save time and plan ahead. Assess your tasks and classify them into urgent, important, and routine, and tackle the tasks in the descending order of urgency. At the end of the day, assess your tasks again to understand which ones are essential and which can be set for a later day. By doing this over a period of time you will learn to organize your work and prioritize your tasks by focusing only on the most productive and important things.
set clear boundaries and disconnect from work:
With the ubiquitous nature of technology comes the compulsion to be always connected. Sometimes this can even become an expectation. It is unhealthy and unhelpful to let technology blur the distinction between work and rest. Being obliged to take up work when you are not expected to exposes you to further demands and more pressure to assume office responsibilities out of office hours. Set a time when you will disconnect from your official email and stay away from the temptation to catch up with the latest. Be reasonable, but compartmentalize work and down time.
declutter your digital landscape:
Inspect your digital tools landscape to see if you have stacked up too many ‘productivity’ tools that actually eat into your time and act as a drag on your productivity. Delete the apps that you tend to habitually follow but are not essential to your work or personal life. Take a dispassionate view of such tools and assess them for real value. This will help you eliminate the fluff and focus on spending your personal time judiciously.
be self-centered about your personal time:
Take care of yourself. A disproportionate number of lifetime illnesses are induced by stress. So, it is essential to find effective stress busters, be it working out regularly or finding those adventures outside of work, where you can detach yourself from the demands of your career and enjoy being yourself. Type A personalities might derive a sense of achievement from aggressive business habits, but they also run the risk of high blood pressure and heart ailments. No career is worth harming yourself. Take out time to enjoy life with your near and dear ones. Challenge yourself, set goals and take active steps Striking a work-life balance is a matter of being able to be productive at work. You need time and effort to recharge your body and mind and replenish your energy, to be at the top of your game at work. To achieve a fine balance between work and life you must challenge yourself, set goals, and take active steps to achieve it, while taking care of your health and wellness. Achieving such a balance can provide more happiness and a sense of fulfillment than anything else.