Balancing work and private life
Almost everyone I know could benefit from a little more work-life balance. Usually the scale is tipped too far to the “work” side, and although it’s great to flourish in your job, it’s not so ideal to let your career run you down. The theme has emerged above all in recent years because the technologies we have available have contributed to making the boundary between office and home fluid, sometimes even breaking down. That’s why it’s so important to find a balance between time spent working and time for a private life.
It is thanks to the technological context – together with a change of mentality – an increasing number of companies choose to be more open to this concept, that is, without a physical office, to let employees work from home for one or more days a week.
It’s important to avoid mixing work and private life: separating spaces – even metaphorically – is key to maintaining focus and recharging batteries. On the other hand, allow yourself a “calibration” period, which allows you to understand what the balance you really want to find is. Makes a plan based on these below mentioned recommendations and follow it strictly:
Establish spaces and timetables: one of the advantages allowed by new technologies, and evident especially for those who work remotely, is linked to the possibility of managing their own time independently. Unlike what you might think, however, it is essential to learn how to do it, otherwise the risk is to get lost behind a thousand other activities and not to know how to correctly manage the priority. Try to understand how many hours you can really dedicate to work and how many you need for yourself and for your activities.
Be effective: it is the secret to becoming a master of work-life balance. Make your goals clear. Define the activities in a precise way – breaking down those that are too large into micro-activities – and plan correctly. Find the ideal solution for you, starting from simple reminders to the use of techniques like the tomato one, which consists of breaking down the activities into 25 minute intervals followed by a pause of 5. There are also other tools to help you track the different phases of an activity, for example Trello, a software designed to organize and optimize work.
Don’t get distracted! Take a test: try to see how much time you spend in unnecessary activities (meetings for example – that could be replaced and solved with a simple email) or browsing on social networks … and reset it.
What if I can’t do it?
It is not said that you immediately find the perfect balance, nor that once defined it doesn’t vary (there is always an emergency).
The work-life balance is like riding a bicycle: it helps you to reach goals that you wouldn’t have imagined – both in terms of working productivity and enjoyment of personal life – but as long as you are in the saddle it is up to you to keep the balance.