Integrating any of the following strategies into your work life can beneficial to anyone.
Written by Sarah Legg 03 May 2022 (Clinical Nurse and Business Owner)
Positive physical, emotional and mental wellbeing are important benefits of having a healthy work-life balance.
Other huge benefits in taking steps to improve include your career, mental health, relationships and more. Here are a number of strategies you can try to incorporate while working to improve your work-life balance.
1. Have a morning routine
Establishing a morning routine has been all the rage these past few years, with many people believing the ‘perfect’ routine will be the magic bullet to all their balancing problems. While it may not be the one solution that solves all your problems, kicking off your morning in the right way can help you get on track of the rest of the day.
Your morning routine might involve:
Exercise
Reading
Spend time with family
Write a to-do list the night before
Wake up at your “right time”
2. Eat, Sleep and exercise
To have any possibility or semblance of a healthy work life balance, you must eat right, get adequate sleep and do some form of regular exercise.
You need these three basic fundamentals working for you, otherwise there is no point attempting any other work life balance strategies.
Daily Routines (2020) explained, “There’s no point in trying to figure out the best to-do list system or the latest trends for productivity hacks, if you’re only getting four hours of sleep a night and eating McDonald’s every second night for dinner.”
3. Establish boundaries and stick to them
Setting boundaries with your people can be one of the most useful strategies you can bring into action in order to improve your work life balance. It can also be the hardest to implement. Everyone has at some point been interrupted either while at work or home for an urgent matter.
I know this from experience. Long long ago, while a shift worker, and excited to have a day off while the husband was at work and children were at school so I could catch up on the housework uninterrupted. Ha! That was a dream. I will never know how my husband got away with it, because he would ring multiple times each day. Multiple! He would linger on each call and dare I manage to hang up, 5 minutes later there he was again ringing. I would literally never get to mark a single item off my to-do list, the whole day with nothing achieved. Yes, I did end that relationship thankfully. But that is not a story for this moment.
Be firm, clearly state the new expected boundaries to family and also with work colleagues. Be sure they understand that you WILL NOT be answering the phone, please leave a message and you will call back at an appropriate time. Do not give in. That has an added bonus, it can also save you time. Say the caller does not leave a message, then you do not need to call them back. Problem solved! Anyone making an urgent call will leave a message if no one answers the call and you did say they must leave one.
4. Learn to say “No”
Flowing on well from No 3 is learning to say no. Not just to call interruptions, but to other questions also. You have a busy day ahead and the boss swans through on her way out the door saying, “Oh Darling, there’s a man coming in this afternoon to assess the printer, be a dear and wait till he leaves to lock up.”
Before you have processed the order and understood, she has left and you realise it’s your day to pick up the kids from school.
Learn to say, “No, that's not enough notice”. Then if you are feeling guilty, ring your child's best friend's mum and ask if they can have an after school play date at her house till you are done. Then you can notify the boss it's ok after all.
There are a few different results that can lead from this, all are good.
The boss may have already made other arrangements, so now you will have a little extra “me time” before collecting the children
The boss finally realises that you are not her personal slave, to be there whenever it suits her. She might stop or at least ask you for less favours not listed in your job specifications.
5. Learn to delegate
We all like to think we are superhuman. Some of us also think that only we can do the job properly. I'm here to tell you that it is a falesy. There are also people out there who want to help you do those tasks, are trained in completing those tasks, and may even do a better job because they have more time to do so.
With each task you delegate to someone else, you gain more time for yourself with which to utilise other strategies to improve your work life balance.
Delegating might only be the beginning of your journey back to a healthy work life balance. Why not take back control of your time at work. With a virtual assistant at your fingertips, there are countless different ways in which you can gain a better work life balance and find the extra time needed to complete other tasks that can not be delegated.
To be continued…..
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