Get Back Your Work/Life Balance
Was there a time in your life where you were happy with the balance of your work and life together and now you can only look fondly on that time? Maybe your work has gotten out of control and you work more hours than you can easily handle. Maybe you have let your life get the better of you and you have little time for work now.
Whatever the case, we have some suggestions to help restore that balance. Here are some practical things you can do to get your work and life to operate harmoniously together.
Establish Your Priorities
Creating balance in your life that you are happy with starts by determining what your priorities are. You can make a list of them to help you out, writing down the things in your life that mean the most to you. This own; t solve all of your problems, but it will be a good start.
As you make your life, feel free to shift some things around. There are a few priorities that may come into your mind faster than the ones that really have true meaning for you. As you make your list, think of where priorities like work, family time, personal growth, and spirituality should go there. Which order would you like them to be in, whether they are currently in that order now? This exercise gets you thinking, and to help you stay focused and motivated, you can put that list up where you will see it every day.
Set Your Goals
The next step is to set some goals. These should be medium to long-range goals. What do you want to accomplish in the next month, half a year, year and five years? These are the goals that you are working for.
Once you have set those goals, then you can determine if you are making any progress toward them. Once again, set the list of goals in a place where you will see them each day. Check in with these goals regularly to see if you are working toward them or if they are sitting there with no progress being made month after month.
Having some goals is a great way to keep you motivated and on the right track. This will help you change your life for the better from one year to the next. If you have no goals, you will find yourself stuck and doing the same thing year after year or getting farther from your goals with each passing year.
Here is how this will help your work/life balance- setting goals tells you whether you are putting enough time into what is important to you. It may be necessary to cut back on some work so that you have time to put some effort into the things that you want to accomplish in the next few years. If you are always working, then you may not be making any progress toward those long-term goals.
Cut Out Distractions
What do you do each day that keeps you back from accomplishing what you set out to do? Maybe you planned to get a certain amount of work done, but then you ended up wasting time on social media or on the internet. That needs to be something that you target and try to eliminate or cut back on. Anything that is a distraction for you that actively keeps you from making progress toward your goals or hitting those goal posts for each day- that needs to be removed from your life as much as possible.
Make More Time in Your Day
How do you get more time each day? You need to cut back on some things that you could do without. That could mean cutting back on movie and TV watching time. That could mean cutting back on some of the chores you do all the time. For instance, if you clean your home regularly, then you may want to have someone else do that every so often. You could use Brooklyn affordable home cleaning to get your house looking nice, and then you would have more time for the things you want to get done.
Your work/life balance is a fragile thing, and you can easily start to accumulate small tasks throughout your day that make it hard to keep the two in balance. Look at what you are doing each day and each week and reassess if all of those things are necessary. There might be some tasks that you could do without or some that you could hire someone else to do occasionally.
Test Out Some Changes
You may not have all the answers about how to fix your work/life balance. What you may have are a few ideas that may or may not work. You will want to be careful about committing too much and too deeply to any one idea. Some of them may not be as successful as you think they will be.
What we recommend is writing down a few of your ideas to fix the balance and then testing them out one at a time. So, if you think that changing up your work schedule will help you to balance out your life. You can try that for a short while. See if it has the desired effect.
If you think that scheduling in a game night or a date night each week will help with the balance, then try that out and see if it makes the kind of impact you are hoping for.
What tends to happen as you test out changes is that you find that the results are a bit different from what you expected. You may see that changing some of your schedule will help a bit but not quite fix everything. So, that means you are off to a good start and you simply need to make some more changes. Any positive change that helps to bring your work and family or social life back closer to a healthy balance is a good thing.