Everyone wants to achieve the elusive work-life balance, which can seem complicated to accomplish when the work days are longer. Still, we are always connected, and there are always more responsibilities, engagements, and commitments to keep up with. There are ways to improve your work-life balance.
Know Your Values
The first step to improving your work-life balance is knowing what you value right now and want to value. What is your current priority? Is your family, career, school, or something else?
Your values and priorities inform your decisions or tell you when to honor your current focus.
If you say your value is family. Still, you attend every weeknight happy hour with your colleagues and are the first to volunteer on projects that will take you away from your family. Are you honoring your priority?
By knowing what you value and your current priority, you can use your priority as a decision filter to know what to say yes to and what to say no to.
A Word On Balance
Balance means that everything is weighted equally. If you thought of your life in terms of life categories: health, career, environment, relationships, personal growth, contribution, spirituality, finances, family, and fun, you would give equal importance to each category.
You would spend just as much effort, time, and energy focused on your career as you would on your finances, environment, relationships, etc.
The problem with this is that it needs to consider your priorities or the season of life you are in. The definition of priority is that something is treated as more important than another. And there is a good reason why you sometimes want to prioritize something over another.
This goes hand-in-hand with the season of life that you are in. There are certain seasons where you need to be more balanced, and others where going off balance will serve you.
If you just gave birth, you probably want to prioritize your family and healing during postpartum. If you aim for a promotion, you will spend more time, energy, focus, and energy on your career than on fun during that season. If you are getting your master’s degree, you will prioritize that during the season that you are enrolled in school.
Seasons come and go. There is the season you are in school, the season you are in college, the season you focus on your career, the season you focus on your family, etc. And it can be good to have a particular focus, aka priority, for a season.
It is always a good idea to ask yourself if you want to be balanced right now or if you want to be unbalanced for a season. If you know why you are doing something, it will be easier to stick with it when it gets complicated.
Set Boundaries
With so many different things and people competing for your attention, it can be easy to get lost in the chaos or become consumed with what other people ask, demand, request or expect of you.
A way to combat this is to set boundaries. Set boundaries around the hours you are willing to work, when you will respond to messages and phone calls, and by saying no to commitments that are not your priority.
You don’t have to say yes if someone invites you to speak at a conference or out for coffee.
You can say no and, and you your time, values, and priorities.
It is up to you to uphold and maintain your boundaries.
If your phone rings, you don’t have to answer it. You can always call back at a time that is more convenient for you.
If someone texts you, you don’t need to respond right away. You can reply when you want to.
Plan Results
When planning your time and what you will produce at work and home, determine the result you want to create instead of just the time you will spend doing the activity.
If you need to create a presentation at work, don’t plan to “work on the presentation.” Instead, plan to “create client presentation.”
This also works at home for tasks you have to do. Don’t plan to “clean your house.” Instead, when you are making your plan, plan to “clean bathtubs, sinks, and counters.” This is much more specific, and you know the particular result you are trying to create.
This keeps you focused and ensures you create results instead of spending time on activities that keep you busy and unproductive.
Resources:
- 3 Ways to Feel Less Overwhelmed at Work (free guide)
Set Constraints For Yourself
It can be helpful to place constraints on yourself when you want to focus more on a goal or when you want to free up your mental energy.
It is best used to free up mental energy. There are so many decisions that need to be made in a day, and those decisions compound if you do something like scrolling social media because you will be bombarded with even more decisions, such as:
- should I like this post?
- should I comment on this post?
- do I want to skip this story?
- do I want to go back and rewatch that last story?
- should I message her?
- should I keep scrolling?
- should I stop scrolling?
- should I click this button?
- do I want to buy this?
Eventually, you will get decision fatigue and tire out your brain. Those are only questions for when you are scrolling through social media. There are so many more questions that you have to answer every day, like what you want to wear, what route you want to take to work, what you want to eat, how you want to start your day if you’re going to run an errand on your way home or save it for later, etc.
By implementing constraints, you can stop a lot of that chatter. You can choose to put a rule in your life about anything. You only check your email after 9 am and spend only one hour on emails daily. It can be that on Tuesdays, you have tacos for dinner, and you can wear a skirt and a blouse daily to work.
Ideas for constraints you can set in your life:
- the types of foods you will eat and when you will eat them
- what clothes will you wear
- the times of day that you will put your phone in another room
- how many hours a day you will spend watching tv
The point of constraints is that you have already decided for yourself, so you don’t need to entertain the mental chatter of going back and forth about making a decision.
Setting constraints in your life is a way to simplify your life.
Say No
Say no to others when they ask you to do things you don’t want. Other people will always make requests and ask you to do something. But just because they ask doesn’t mean you have to say yes.
It is up to you to protect your time and determine what is important to you.
In the book The First 90 Days, the author recommends that when a colleague asks you to do something, you don’t automatically say yes right away. Many women are in the habit of saying yes to others to please them.
Instead, you can say that you will get back to them. This is especially important if you already have a full plate. You don’t want to overcommit, overextend yourself, and be unable to follow through and deliver on what you promised.
A Final Note
You have a choice. You can choose to say no to baking one hundred handmade cupcakes; you can say no to volunteering at events you don’t want to be at. You can even say no to cleaning your house or cooking dinner, and you don’t have to do any of it.
Sometimes just remembering that you have a choice in these things and that you don’t have to do something you don’t want to do can help you feel better about doing what you want to do.