Whether you’re an entrepreneur, a manager at a firm, or a regular employee, balancing your personal life with your professional one can be a pain sometimes. Workplaces can also be demanding, challenging, and competitive. We often find ourselves prioritizing work over our personal mental and physical well-being, just to achieve that specific target, accomplish a goal, or not to upset your manager.
If you struggle with balancing your work life with your personal one, here is a list of ways as to how you can keep them both balanced and live a balanced life.
First of all, what is work-life balance?
A work-life balance refers to the perfect balance of your time, efforts, and energy, which you spend in your personal life as well as your professional one. It’s about prioritizing your personal life and your professional life at the same time. It’s about finding the right amount of time you need to invest in your personal life and loved ones, as well as your career and work life.
For many career enthusiasts, it often becomes difficult to draw boundaries and lines between how much time they need to spend in their personal life and how much to spend on work. Or they are constantly juggling between the two, either taking their work life back home or bringing their personal lives to the office. How can you be someone who doesn’t do this?
1. Setting Boundaries
The first thing you need to do is identify what work means to you, what hours you need to dedicate to work, and where you draw the line between work and your personal life. In this way, you not only set those boundaries and timelines for yourself and motivate yourself to stick to them, but you also create your boundaries in front of your colleagues.
- Using different apps: you can make use of social networking platforms, such as WhatsApp, Instagram, Snapchat, for your personal use. You can use other apps such as LinkedIn, Zoom, and Skype, for work-related matters.
- Separate email accounts: Google has an option to create different user profiles and suggest content accordingly. Make use of this feature and create separate work and private life accounts.
- Divide time: if you work a desk job, dedicate certain number hours to work only, and when you come home, leave that work there. In this way, you will be creating boundaries between your personal life and work life.
Setting boundaries is a great way of keeping personal and professional lives separate. When you know what those boundaries are in your mind and others know it, too, it helps create a good balance.
2. Work Smarter, Not Harder
A lot of people believe that working hard, spending excessive amount of time at work, and doing everything with extra passion is the way to achieve success. However, the truth is far from it. People who know how to work smarter are the ones who actually achieve success.
- Look for shortcuts: some tasks don’t require excessive effort from your end. In such tasks, you can always look for shortcuts or hacks through which you can get done with them quicker than usual. This is how you become smart about your work.
- Manage your time efficiently: time management solutions are what will help you manage your time efficiently and achieve your goals throughout the day. You need to make sure you’re utilizing your time perfectly for all your tasks. You can also look for time management apps for professionals, they’re super helpful!
- Create a daily work routine: before starting off your day, create a routine for your tasks that you need to complete that day and assign a time duration to those tasks too. Always leave some room for breaks. In this way, you will be able to achieve all your tasks because you know what you have for you that day.
Once you achieve your tasks that you need to achieve, you will be able to complete all your work during your work hours only. This means you can go home on time and then devote the rest of the day to your personal life only without worrying about work.
3. Organize Your Life
Organizing your life means organizing everything ranging from your personal life, work life, daily routine, and even your surroundings. You need to get hold of all your matters regarding your life first, so that you can be able to balance your work and personal life accordingly too.
- Keep your space clean: keeping your space clean will free your mind and also make you feel more at peace. When your space is really cluttered, it has a direct impact on your mind and body. It makes you feel like things aren’t in your control. On the other hand, a clean space makes you feel like wanting to come home and feel like you’re organized.
- Use apps: make use of the best life organizer apps to organize your life. These apps are really handy when it comes to organizing because they have every single detail you need in them. Imagine having your schedule, tasks, and additional notes out there in front of you to see whenever you want to. It’s a great way of knowing what you have ahead of you and what you need to accomplish. Find the best app to organize your life by looking for one that meets most of your requirements and stick to it!
- Set goals: setting goals for yourself and accomplishing them is a great way of organizing your life. You need to know what your goals are at all times and work to accomplish them. They can be personal goals, as well as professional goals for your career or job. In this way, you can balance the amount of effort you’re putting into both goals as well, and you will have a clear picture of what needs your utmost attention and what your priorities are.
Organizing your life will help you create more time and efforts for your personal and professional life, which will ultimately help you balance it more.
4. Learn to Say No
There are times when you feel like you’re finding yourself in impossible situations, and this can arise when your boss is asking you to work overtime, reaching out to you for work-related concerns past your working hours, and you’re unable to make time for your loved ones.
- Say no politely: if you feel like you’re being mean or if you’re not in a position to turn down your boss, you can say no to your boss politely by making up an excuse for your personal commitments. In this way, you will not feel like you’ve said something rudely.
- Take on tasks if they’re easy: if you feel like you have been saying no for a while and you want to put your best foot forward in front of your boss, then be smart about it and take on the easy tasks. If it’s manageable for you, then work on short tasks if your boss urgently asks you to do so. In this way, you won’t be giving up a lot to perform that short task.
- Have a conversation about boundaries: if your boss has consistently been pushing your boundaries and asking you to work overtime or past your shift hours more than frequently, maybe it’s time to have a serious conversation about it. Let your boss know how you’re not able to manage your personal life with work life because of your added responsibilities and ask for a solution to it. Having a conversation sounds stressful at first, but once you get done with it, it feels like some weight has been lifted off your shoulders.
Saying no when it’s time for you to say so is a much needed thing to do at times. It helps you focus more on your personal life.
5. Take Breaks
Taking breaks from your work or in between your work is essential when it comes to working your job successfully. It helps you avoid burnout and feeling exhausted. Whenever you return from a break, you feel more motivated towards doing your job and accomplishing your goals.
- Take short breaks: sitting at your desk for eight hours without any break is not good for your mind, nor your body. It’s important for you to take a little walk across your office, munch on something, or even talk to your colleague in between. Whenever you’re doing any of these, remind yourself that you are taking a break for yourself.
- Take longer breaks: if you’re someone who’s tired of the daily monotonous routine of coming to work and going back home, consider taking a longer break for a couple of days. You can make use of your annual leaves or even take PTO to spend time at home, reconnect with your loved ones, and focus on your personal life. Whenever you return to work, you’ll feel more productive, and you’ll feel like accomplishing bigger goals.
- Go on a vacation: yes, going on a vacation is a great way to rewind and de-stress after spending many days working hard or feeling exhausted. If your job is really competitive, challenging, and demanding, then going on a vacation will free you from all those worries and it will be a great reset for you!
Breaks are essential when it comes to doing our jobs without feeling exhausted or burnout. Breaks are a great way to reset and can be short or as long as you need, depending on what you’re feeling at that moment.
6. Prioritize Your Health
Your health is not just your physical health. It’s also your mental wellbeing and taking care of it is the same way as taking care of your physical health, if not more. You need to realize that your health is the most important thing in your life. If you don’t have your health, you don’t have anything.
- Eat healthy: your health starts with what you eat. Try having a balanced diet of healthy foods, such as greens and foods rich in vitamins. Try to cut off junk food as much as you can. Caffeine and sugar need to be avoided at all costs too.
- Exercise more: your diet is not enough to keep you healthy, you need to get yourself moving too. Start off with small exercises and little movements if you’re not someone who exercises very frequently. Build up your stamina slowly and gradually. Eventually, you’ll reach that point where you’re able to exercise more and more every day.
- Journaling: journaling is a great way to take care of your mental health and to deal with your feelings in a positive way. A lot of us are those people who don’t feel comfortable sharing our feelings our personal thoughts with others. We don’t feel like making ourselves look vulnerable in front of others so we keep our thoughts and feelings to ourselves only. However, doing so leads to feeling resentment or feeling like you’re about to burst. Therefore, writing down your feelings in a journal is a great way to express your feelings in a safe space.
- Meditating: sit down, relax, and balance your body while your mind spiritually awakens. You need to sit still for a couple of minutes. Focus on your breathing, and how your muscles relax with each breath that you take. Meditating will help you lower your stress, reduce brain chatter, understand your pain, increase self-awareness, and improve your overall mental wellbeing. It’s a great way to improve your mental health.
When you prioritize your health, you learn to prioritize yourself too. You do things in favor of your body, and you do them while keeping in mind that you need to take care of yourself. Therefore, you also learn to prioritize your personal life when needed.
To conclude, when you set boundaries, work smarter, organize your life, learn to say no, take breaks, and learn to prioritize yourself and your health, you eventually realize how you can balance your work life with your personal one.
