Striving for a Better Work-Life Balance
Changing old habits is hard. Practice and persistence are necessary to form new habits, but your reward will be the life balance you seek. In this blog you’ll learn six steps for achieving a better work-life balance.
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Striving for a Better Work-Life Balance
There was a time when a clear line existed between work and personal lives, but technology has increasingly blurred it. We shop online at work and return work e-mails from home. Allowing work to slip into, or even erode, our personal lives can be a source of individual stress and frustration for loved ones.
If you’re looking to improve your work-life balance, there are a number of steps you can take.
Six Steps for Achieving a Better Work-Life Balance
- Establish your priorities. Your first step should be an honest accounting of the relative value of, and reward from, the pursuit of career advancement and higher income against the value of being present in the lives of loved ones or the pursuit of personal passions. When you are able to establish this relationship, it becomes easier to strike the right balance.
- Create a plan. Work-life balance requires thought and planning. Plan the week ahead; know what events and responsibilities will demand your time. By looking ahead, you are better able to budget your time in accordance with your priorities.
- Work smarter—at work and at home. If you examine how you spend your time, you may discover that substantial time is devoted to non-priority activities. Also, try to avoid multitasking. Doing two things at once is not possible. In fact, when you try to multitask, it only results in work taking longer to accomplish.
- Find ways to create time. Think about how you can more efficiently use your hours. For example, can you use public transportation to commute and spend that time doing work? Are there household chores that you can hire someone to do?
- Schedule family time and downtime. Scheduling time for family or for yourself creates a structure that better ensures that you actually engage in those activities.
- Leave work at work. It’s easy to default to doing work at home, but you need to draw a bright line between home and work. Of course, it isn’t always easy to do that, so find a transitional activity—such as listening to music on the commute home or an hour at the gym—which can help you to put work firmly behind you.
Changing old habits is hard. Practice and persistence are necessary to form new habits, but your reward will be the life balance you seek.
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