Every day we face the challenge of balancing our time between work and life. Many of us believe that the more work we do the more effective we will be, but that’s not actually the case. Maintaining work-life balance is absolutely essential to driving effectiveness.

Why Balance is So Important

Imagine you start working on a project and decide to be as effective as possible, starting work  at 8am, not stopping for 24 hours. This would destroy your effectiveness. The human body requires rest and recreation. If you ignore this, you will crash and be unable to work after a few hours. You’ve likely already experienced this.

That is why balancing work and rest is critical to effectiveness. Research suggests that you should work in short bursts (45 minutes or whatever works for you) and then take a break. The brain is just like a muscle—if you don’t take a break between exercising your muscles, you become sore and unable to function. By taking a break, you give your muscles an opportunity to recover and regain strength. Over time, you become stronger, faster, and build endurance. The same goes for your brain, you need to give it an opportunity to rest and recover before continuing with more work, improving your ability to think critically and quickly, and focus intently. 

Be Proactive

The fundamental way to achieve balance is to realize that the person who decides how you spend your time is you. I know this may seem obvious when it’s written like this but you may not believe this statement. People have a tendency to transfer responsibility for how they spend their time to other people or circumstances.

“I have to get a report done, so can’t spend time with friends”.

“I don’t have time to meditate.”

“I don’t have time to exercise.”

You may have heard these statements before,  or may have said them yourself (I have). These are reactive statements that transfer responsibility to something or someone else (report, lack of time). Instead, try a proactive approach to thinking and speaking about your responsibilities. For instance: 

“I’m going to get a report done, I will not spend time with friends”.

“I choose to do other things and not to meditate.”

“I choose to spend my time on things other than exercise.”

While the results of the above statements are the same, the reason for the results are completely different. In the proactive approach, it is very clear that you make the decisions and because of this, you can also change your decisions. It’s a way to remind yourself that you’re in control.

Start with the end in mind

It’s important to visualize what work life balance actually means to you. To do this, look at your roles in life and figure out your goals for each role. Here is an example

• Role: Employee
  • Goal: Finish Project One – Learn a new skill needed for work
• Role: Individual
  • Goal: Be healthy
• Role: Parent
  • Goal: Be a supportive person for my children

 

If you think about it, you have many more roles but let’s start with a few and focus on those.

First things first

Now that we’ve outlined roles and goals, we need to pick one or two goals in each of the roles for the coming week, make time (i.e. a plan), and take action.

• Role: Employee
  • Goal: Finish Project One – Learn a new skill needed for work
  • Plan: Block off Monday 9am to 12pm and put this on the calendar
• Role: Individual
  • Goal: Be healthy
  • Plan: Schedule a walk each morning before the kids are up—8am to 8:30am. Cook or order a healthy lunch (steamed veggies, salad, etc).
• Role: Parent
  • Goal: Be a supportive person for my children
  • Plan: Plan to have dinner with the family during the week and talk about their day—schedule the days and times on your calendar

 

You get the idea. Making time, a plan, and putting things in your calendar make you 90% more likely to actually follow through and do the above. Planning a week at a time, in addition to daily, is a very effective way to achieve balance between work and life. 

Segment your day

It’s helpful to create personal boundaries. For example, if you find yourself staying at the office late at night, you may want to plan that you’ll only work from 9am to 5pm each day, and after 5pm no more work. Hours after 5pm are then dedicated to family,  a significant other, friends, etc. Creating time for yourself, as an individual, is also important. You could allot the hour between 9pm and 10pm for instance, as  “personal time”. Flexibility is also important to deal with unexpected things so make sure to leave some buffer time or changing your schedule if you need to. Apps, such as Yomez, automate much of this process and easily adapt when changes occur. By getting into the habit of scheduling and sticking to time frames for different roles and responsibilities, it will be easier to transition from one state of mind to the next.

May the Balance be with you

As you’ve seen, balance is required to be effective. It’s really a self evident natural law if you think about it. Work-life balance is achievable and will make you more effective in the long run. It’s an iterative incremental process of change from the inside out so start small, don’t worry about perfection, and take steps forward in your journey towards balance.