A Better Work-Life Balance
There’s no denying that many of us try our best to balance our work with our pleasure, although saying we do it is a lot easier than actually doing it. There are many different factors that come into play when we think of things like this, like assignments and deadlines, as well as our own personal financial situation, which can make the balance all the more difficult. So, if you are struggling to manage your work with your personal life, here are a few things that you should keep in mind.
TECH CAN BE BAD – With the rapid increase in technology over the past few decades, more and more schools, offices and other work places have implemented increased technological into our daily lives, to provide people with more accurate detail, fewer mistakes and, thanks to the internet, an almost endless variety of information from a vast array of varying sources. But that doesn’t mean it always has to be used. Because of technology, we now have the ability to work pretty much from anywhere we want, and that is undoubtedly a positive, however, this can get in the way of our lives. With information constantly at our fingertips, we often set ourselves the expectation that it needs to be used constantly, when in actual fact, really all you need to do, and all you should do sometimes, is walk away.
Robert Brooks, a psychology professor at Harvard Medical School says that ‘quality time should be quality time’. What he means by this, is that in order to truly separate yourself from your work, don’t engage in activities that encourage you to think about it. For example, don’t think about your next deadline when you’re meeting with friends, engage in the conversation. By thinking about deadlines and assignments, you can ‘inject an undercurrent of stress into your system’, ultimately stopping you from enjoy the moment you’re in. By restricting your involvement in your work life, when you aren’t at work can help to improve your resilience, and studies have shown that resilient people can feel a greater sense of control in their lives. So, when you work – work. And when you’re enjoying life – enjoy life.
REMOVE TIME WASTERS – One thing that many people have to deal with, but are often too polite to do anything about is time wasters. You may know one or two, and whilst most of the time they are harmless and don’t mean any trouble, at the end of the day, they can affect how productive you are in managing your work-life balance. By establishing what is important to you both in your work life, and your outside and home life, you can set yourself goals and achievements that you are aiming to meet. Time wasters can prevent this. There is nothing wrong about denying/ declining an invitation to go out out, if there’s important work to be done – and it’s certainly not selfish. All you’re doing is setting up priorities for yourself, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Learning to prioritise between what is seemingly urgent and what is actually important is one of the more Important life-skills you can learn.
We’ve all tried putting off work by distracting ourselves that we are more interested in doing something more Urgent,, and once again, thanks to technology this procrastination has become much easier than before. If you find yourself scrolling through Instagram for hours on end, looking at posts of people you’ve never met when there’s a really important essay that needs to be done, then you, in that moment, is exactly the type of person who this podcast is aimed at a procrastinator so have a listen to our Procrastination talk as well. If this is you, there are multiple apps that can limit your time on your phone, forcing you to get on with the work, because at the end of the day, if YOU don’t do the work, then YOU’RE to blame.
EXERCISE – We’ve spoken about exercise before and for good reason. Exercise is one of the best ways to reduce stress, and promote and help give us a calming mindset. Just like we would sleep and eat, exercise is a much-needed activity that can improve our lives. Of course, going for a three-hour hike might be a little bit too time consuming for some of us, but even just simple breathing exercises have shown their benefits. Exercise releases feel-good hormones into our system that allow us to relax and stop stressing about things that often times we are unable to control.
DON’T PERFECT – Being a perfectionist when there’s only one thing to focus on is harmless, but as life gets more and more complicated, and you amass more and more responsibilities, being a perfectionist can be destructive. Dr Marylin Puder-York, has mentioned that being a perfectionist later in life is harmful to the way in which you live. With being a perfectionist, you aspire for every little detail of everything you do to be as good as it can be, however, in trying to achieve this you will undeniably burn out, and suffer from the stress. To avoid burning out, is to simply let go of perfectionism. That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t try, it just means that sometimes you have to accept that things are as good as they are, and that there’s nothing you can do to change it. Dr Puder-York suggests that rather on focusing on perfectionism, you should focus on excellence. Whilst these terms might appear almost identical, there is actually big differences between them. Perfectionists focus on having things appear the right way, and focusing on whether people think that they have done the right thing. Excellence is purely about results. To put simply, perfectionism is thinking about doing the right thing, excellence IS doing the right thing.