What is work-life balance?
Work-life balance is the equilibrium between your career, its impact on your life, and its relationship with your personal, home life. Work-life balance in the sociological lens generally has a stronger focus on family-life for working mothers and fathers. The sociological lens outlines the difference between paid work and unpaid domestic work and the impact of women’s paid work on families. I don’t have children at the moment, so I can’t really relate, but I can say I can only imagine the numerous challenges that mothers and fathers face when they go back to the workforce and essentially double their workload. But, for now, that’s not really what this post and blog is about.
You do not have to be a parent or have kids around to have a need for work-life balance. Everyone needs equilibrium between how much focus and energy they put into their work versus their home life.
Why is work-life balance important?
If you do have kids, you should find a way to balance your work life and family life for the betterment of your children’s lives. Finding this balance would contribute to a healthy and happy family. For a lot of professionals, that means keeping your paid work at work and focusing on your family when you’re at home. Make dediciated time to your family when you are off, so you can focus on and build those relationships.
Prioritizing work-life balance would also help with making your relationship, if you’re in one, stronger as well. If you’re not in a relationship, finding a good work-life balance will give you time to date.
Prioritizing work-life balance is also beneficial, for most importantly, yourself! It means you’re prioritizing your own physical and mental health. It means you are putting your happiness first in all aspects of your life, without hindering your career progress or your personal relationships and health.
How do we achieve a work-life balance?
Making time for the people in your life. Foster a strong support system at home for yourself and your family by focusing on them when you have the time. Put your emails on quiet mode when you’re off so you are not needlessly distracted at work. If you’re like me and are in management you may need to keep an eye on your emails, so make an effort to check once an hour or two instead of having notifications on. Another email tip, if you use Outlook at work, set rules to automatically file emails into relevant folders. This will not only keep you organized with less effort, but it will also limit the amount of notifications coming your way. If something is automatically filed, you won’t get a beep notifying you of it.
As someone who works in management, I have found that it can be really difficult to set aside time to sit down and eat your lunch. Set aside a lunch hour and either close your door or physically leave the office for lunch. If you can’t manage to do this, your meal will likely be interupted.
Same thing goes for getting exercise, which is especially important and difficult if you work at a desk. If you have an hour for lunch, I would highly recommend setting aside half of it for eating and relaxing and the other half for getting some exercise. Go for a walk around or within the building you work in.
Make sure you are prioritizing your health over your work. Eventually, your health will catch up with you and impact your work, so it is best to prioritize it and prevent any health issues that can be prevented.
Obviously, if you work a physically demanding job, exercise is less important. But, meals are even more important than those who work at a desk. Your body needs fuel to support your work and if you don’t supply it, you’ll be running on empty. You’ll likely lose weight too fast and won’t gain any muscle mass. In the long term it can cause you to gain weight because your body will get into the habit of retaining fat in order to burn calories to support your work.
Mental health is also very important to maintaining a healthy work-life balance. I highly recommend meditation as a means of bringing your mind back to a settled place. Meditation can look different for everyone, there is no right way and no wrong way to meditate. As long as you are working to clear your mind, you are on the right track. Journalling, or some other source of reflection is highly recommended as well. It is important to touch base with yourself regularly and reflect on whether you are on the right track to meeting your goals.
If you’re interested in achieving a work-life balance, stay tuned! I will be consistently posting about the topics above and how they contribute to a healthy work-life balance. Let me know in the comments below if there are any topics in particular you’d like me to dive deeper into.
By The Scales 