When your working and personal lives are out of kilter with each other, it is almost always your personal life that gets short-changed. Your hobbies and interests get put on to the back burner, your bike gathers dust in the shed, your relationships lose the fizzle they once had, and you find yourself feeling a bit like a hamster on a wheel.
Achieving work-life balance is about separating your work life from your personal life as far as is possible and finding a comfortable equilibrium between them.
Here are some of the reasons you should strive for this balance:
1. It is important for your physical health:
- Unrelenting stress impacts on your physical health (think high blood pressure and heart disease).
- Allowing work to eat in to your leisure time means too little time on your bike, or playing sport, or walking – or whichever form of physical exercise you prefer.
2. It is important for your mental health:
- Unrelenting stress leads to mental fatigue and may progress to depression, anxiety, burnout and other unwelcome manifestations of impaired mental health.
- Having interests outside of work – and taking the time to pursue them – is refreshing and liberating and is good for your soul.
3. It increases your productivity:
- Taking time out (both physically and mentally) from your work, particularly when you use that time to engage in pleasurable activities, helps clear the cobwebs.
- Your productivity at work is likely to take a boost as a result.
4. You become a more rounded individual:
- Having interests outside of work – and taking the time to pursue them – makes you a more interesting (and inspirational) person (not only to others, but to yourself too!)
- Not only that, but you develop a range of skills apart from those you use at work.
5. You only live once:
- So live that life to the fullest!
- Don’t wait to get years down the line only to discover that you missed out. Time is something you can never get back.
Now is the time to take charge of your life, to look forward to laughing again and to dusting the cobwebs off your bike. I invite you to envision a future in which you take central stage – and to draw up a plan for achieving that goal.
Here are some of the things you could build in to your plan:
- Place value on the time spent in leisure rather than at work (read my blog about opportunity cost);
- Spend more time with friends and family;
- Spend more time with people who have similar interests (music, perhaps, or football);
- Further your knowledge and expertise in a field of interest (concerns about the environment, perhaps, or civic affairs);
- Spend time being engrossed in your passions (writing? bee-keeping? rock-climbing?);
- Go away for the weekend every now and then;
- Do some life-laundry and de-cluttering (read my blog posts to get started);
- Take exercise (it’s time to dust the cobwebs off that bike);
- Get some real sleep;
- Eat some real food;
- Read a real book;
- Avoid taking work calls or dealing with work e-mails during personal time.
If you could do with some help in drawing up that plan and establishing boundaries between work and leisure, read about my approach to counselling, mentoring and life-coaching then message me and we will draw the plan up together.
