WORK-LIFE BALANCE- 8 KEY WAYS TO ATTAIN IT
Work is one of the essential parts of our lives. We work to meet our ends and achieve our goals. During this process of working, we sometimes forget about our personal lives or choose to ignore them, which results in a disbalance in our work and personal life. The need of the hour is to create a work-life balance.
Most of the time, we are so absorbed by the work we do, that we forget to take care of ourselves and look after our well-being. Therefore, it is crucial to strike a balance between our work and personal life. Working continuously, without catering to our well-being can result in bad mental health. It also affects us physically, but it strains us mentally to a large extent.
Work not only means working at a company or a bank but anything that we engage in and have a sense of duty while doing it, apart from our personal lives. E.g., housewives work in their own houses and have several duties that they perform. Now, it is important for them as well, to not only keep working but take out time for themselves, to energize and feel refreshed.
Creating a work-life balance does not mean detaching yourself from your work to create balance. It means equally attending to yourself and your work at the same time. Work-life balance results in good mental health. It improves our awareness of how much time is needed for both our time and our work. Overall, achieving a work-life balance helps people live a healthy and relatively stress-free life.
8 KEY WAYS FOR ATTAINING WORK-LIFE BALANCE:
1. Create a routine:
Creating a routine and strictly following it is very important to achieve work-life balance. Sometimes, we are so overworked that we have little time for breaks. Other times, we are unsure about how much time we should spend working and how much time we should devote to other activities.
Therefore, making a routine will help us to allocate time for work and personal time where we can engage in activities that we love. A proper routine will help us to work for a specific time and then stop for the day leading to creating a work-life balance.
2. Give time to your health:
A person’s health is above everything. When we have a tonne of work piled up, we tend to put our health last and care less about ourselves. But that should not be the case. Our health has a direct impact on whatever we do, most importantly our work.
When you prioritize your health, a balance will naturally be developed between you and your work. Therefore, to achieve a work-life balance, it is very important to keep our health above all and take good care of it.
3. Stop striving for perfection:
Humans strive for perfection. They want everything to be perfect and hope that everything happens as they want. This also applies during work. While working, they want their results to be perfect and error-free. But, not every time, whatever you work on may be perfect.
We should understand that this undue want for perfection causes a mental toll on our minds. When we don’t obtain the desired perfect outcomes, we become extremely upset and concerned and keep thinking about it. This consumes us completely and prevents us from thinking about anything other than work, including ourselves and our personal lives.
4. Prioritize your tasks:
Some tasks are more important and some are less. Some tasks need to be done urgently, while others can wait. Recognizing and prioritizing important and urgent tasks is necessary to create a work-life balance. When we prioritize our tasks, we know exactly what we need to do on a certain day and reserve our time accordingly. Setting priorities for our jobs also enables us to concentrate on more crucial things at once while blocking out other tasks from our minds which causes us stress.
5. Give yourself at least an hour each day:
Keeping one hour of daily free time for whatever you want to is the most crucial and effective way to achieve work-life balance. It can be more than 1 hour, maybe 2-3 hours or more, depending on the day’s workload, but 1 hour should be a must. In that 1 hour, you can spend time with yourself, and your family, can paint, go for a walk, dance, sing, watch a movie or a show, listen to a podcast, and much more. Even an hour of doing whatever you want to do would relieve you and make you feel good.
6. Spend time with your family and friends:
When was the last time you took the initiative to have a get-together with your close friends? When was the last time you had dinner with your whole family together?
Long back? Cannot remember?
This is an indication that you are too busy with other things, especially your work, and are not spending enough time with your family and friends. You don’t need to spend long hours with them, but what is important is to spend quality time with them, even if it is only for a short while. Spending quality time with your loved ones increases your happiness, reduces stress and anxiety, and leads to a healthy lifestyle, further leading to achieving a work-life balance.
7. Know when to stop:
On one hand, sometimes, we may work nonstop because we have an extreme workload. On the other hand, there are instances when we are having so much fun that we take longer pauses than usual. In the first case, we overwork ourselves which makes us anxious and stressed out and we don’t get time for ourselves. In the second case, we delay our work out of procrastination and ignorance. Therefore, to attain work-life balance, we should know when to stop.
Instead of overloading ourselves with the following task when we are aware that we have finished one activity but that there is still much to do, we should take a short break and stop for a while. Similarly, we should understand when to end a break and start working.
8. Take mindful vacations:
Taking short breaks between work is important, but taking long breaks is equally important. Long breaks in the form of vacations help us a lot to detach from our work for some time and allow us to re-energize. Therefore, we should carefully consider when to take vacations and when we will benefit from them the most. Maybe 3-4 times a year, so that every 3-4 months, we get one trip to refresh ourselves. Mindfully planning vacations is crucial for achieving a work-life balance.
It is crucial to strike a balance in everything, but this is especially true between you and your work. At the end of the day, only you know how to successfully manage your personal and professional lives. Therefore, try to find ways that create a healthy balance between your work and your personal life.
When we talk about work-life balance, it is not only about creating a balance, but also about making your routine flexible. When you bring flexibility into your life, a balance between you and your work is automatically created.
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