Tips on work-life balance

I

t is well known that a good employee ensures that he or she balances between work and his or her life. Today, we want to share some tips on how best you can balance between work and life.

1.Life comes first: First things first – life should be prioritised ahead of work. Without life one cannot even work but one can live and have life without work. Some people get their priorities wrong. Yes, we do need to work hard and take work very seriously but never at the expense of life or living. For instance, one should not fail to go to hospital when he or she is sick simply because they are busy at work.

2. Work feeds life: Although life is a higher priority over work, we need to also recognise that work supports and feeds life. Through work, we gain money or resources that help us to get shelter, food, security, pay bills and buy medicines as well as provide for ourselves many things that our lives need. Therefore, we should still value work a lot.

3. The more you work the better your life becomes: If we want to have a good and comfortable life, we need to work hard. The harder we work, the more money or resources we make, in general. Therefore, while balancing work and life, we need to ensure that we optimise the fruits of our work so that our life can be easier and more fun.

4. Efficiency rules: One ingredient for enabling good work-life balance is efficiency. Without efficiency, we will not have enough time to balance between our work and our life. If we want optimal work-life balance, then we should optimise our efficiency. We should do more things in less time. We should be productive most of the times and waste very little during the day.

5. Guard family or personal time: There should be time slots defined that are reserved for family or personal engagements. For example Sundays and most parts of the rest of the weekend. While you may work late during the week days, it is important to draw a line, the cut off point to be with family or on your own at night be it 630 or 7 pm as examples. At the same time, you need to allow flexibility in case of work emergencies or travel when you may have to sacrifice some of the usual family or personal time

6. Combine certain things: You can use combination of tasks and activities to balance work and life. For example some of the work can be taken home at night rather that leaving office too late. On some of the trips, your work may allow that your spouse or even children accompany you and that is a perfect opportunity to balance work and life. While at times it is unavoidable, some people manage marriages at a distance when they can find ways to reunite and give themselves a good opportunity to balance work and life better.

7. Start your day early: If you wake up early or go to work early, you have an opportunity to have head start at work. This way, you will complete a lot of tasks at work in good time to leave for home in good time in the evening and therefore spend more time for yourself or with your family. Starting your day  early is big magic.

8. Have support structures: The people around you need to provide you with the support required for you to work better. If you have big problems with your spouse or family, your work will inevitably be affected. You need stability at home in order to work optimally. It is important to also ensure that you have people around you that do their part so that you do not have too much baggage of ‘personal and family’ actions that can be done by others so that you have enough time for your work.

Good luck as you work to improve on your work-life balancing act. This way, you will rise and shine!