How to achieve the right work-life balance
How to achieve the right work-life balance when living with your work colleague or family
Achieving work-life balance alone can feel impossible. Throw in a global pandemic where millions of people are working from home with their partner, children, and even colleagues in tow and it can feel impossible to just achieve in work, never mind that balance. So, How to achieve the right work-life balance?
It is extremely difficult to achieve our work goals whilst working from home with family or a colleague, so how do we do this? How do we achieve whilst working remotely so that we can then achieve in life?
5 steps to achieving work-life balance
Working from home successfully requires you to be disciplined with your daily routine. It requires you to have a dedicated workspace that works for you and to be self-motivated to get up and get dressed and to time-manage like never before.
Once you have these in place, only then can you be organised enough and in the right mindset to achieve work-life balance.
Step 1: Do fewer things and do them well
Not everything is equally important so prioritise your work to work smarter, not harder. You will never get everything done so decide on what is important to get done today and what isn’t. That way, if you get on to the less important stuff, that’s a bonus, but if you don’t, you’ve done what you need to.
Step 2: Decide which of your values takes precedence
What is important to you? Perhaps it’s finishing work at a certain time so that you can have dinner with your family or put the kids to bed. Maybe it’s not working a weekend or having time for yourself in the morning so that you can exercise or meditate.
Whatever is important to you, note it down and draw the line there. There should be no exceptions for what matters most to you and having this in mind will make you far more productive for the rest of the time.
Step 3: Do the tasks that give you the biggest bang for your buck
Did you know that most of us get 80% of results from just 20% of the work that we do? Think about everything that you do and identify what tasks give you disproportionate results; identify which ones actually create progress rather than making you tread water and do those first and most frequently.
Step 4: Focus on what only you can do
Whether it’s low-value or low-skill tasks at work or household chores like the laundry or the dishes, delegate or outsource! Someone else can do these while you focus on the things that only you can do. That could be difficult projects or running a sales meeting or it could be something as simple as making it to your parent-teacher conference as schools start up again.
Step 5: Do the urgent-important things first
The best way to prioritise what actually needs to be done are the tasks that are both urgent and important. These need to be done now, so do them first!
Some things that are urgent are not necessarily important and some things are important but they may not be urgent. Then you have the tasks that are neither urgent or important, but alas, they need to be done. If you identify those tasks that are both urgent
and important, always do these first when you’ve just woken up and for the remainder of your time you can concentrate on the rest.
Practice makes perfect
It’s not easy at first, to implement these 5 steps in your daily work routine, but you’ll get much better at this with time. Keep practising, keep tackling those that are both urgent and important first, and over time, you’ll be achieving at home what you do in the office, except with the perfect work-life balance to go with it!
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