Maintaining a healthy work-life balance is vital not just for your employees’ health and relationships, but also for their productivity and, ultimately, their performance. Simply said, if your employees don’t see work as a chore, they’ll work harder, make fewer mistakes, and be more likely to become brand ambassadors.
Overworking isn’t beneficial for people or firms, according to research, yet changing harmful work habits and achieving a more sustainable work-life balance can be difficult in practice. The authors conducted a series of interviews with mid-and senior-level managers at two global organisations to learn more about what it takes for busy professionals to make a positive change. While the majority of respondents believed that working long hours was unavoidable, they discovered that a significant minority of them were able to resist this pressure and create a healthy balance by increasing awareness, intentional reprioritizing, and implementing public and private reforms.
Work-life balance can appear to be an impossibility these days. Workers can be reached 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, thanks to technology. Fear of losing one’s job motivates people to work longer hours. In a Harvard Business School poll, 94 per cent of working professionals claimed they worked more than 50 hours per week, and nearly half claimed they worked more than 65 hours per week. Experts believe that the ever- increasing stress of the never- ending workday is harmful. It can harm relationships, health, and general happiness.
What is Work-Life Balance?
Many people are ‘time poor,’ hurrying from one commitment to the next. And Australians work hard more than one in ten employees works more than 50 hours a week, which the OECD classifies as
“extremely long hours” This makes striking a healthy balance between work and personal life more challenging. A good work-life balance means that the various areas of your life are in harmony. Each area’s advantages can help to support and strengthen the others. Many people are figuring out how to successfully combine their job and personal lives.
Who is Harmed by a Lack of Work-Life Balance?
Australians work longer hours than citizens in most other developed OECD countries, leaving them with less time to care for themselves. Working long hours can have a negative influence on your health, cause stress, and limit your free time.
Simultaneously, more people are working part-time, in low-wage, insecure positions, which might also entail working irregular hours. Working from home and having flexible hours might be beneficial, especially if you have a family. However, because there is no boundary between work and home, it might be difficult to strike a work-life balance.
Work-life balance means different things to different people, but here are some ideas from health and professional experts to help you discover the proper balance for you.
Forget Perfectionism
Many overachievers develop perfectionist tendencies when their time commitments are confined to school, hobbies, and possibly after-school employment. It’s simpler to keep that fastidious habit as a child, but life becomes more complicated as you get older. Your obligations rise as you advance in your career and as your family expands. Perfectionism becomes impossible to achieve, and if left unchecked, it may be destructive. It becomes hard to achieve perfection, and if left unchecked, it can be destructive.
Disconnect Yourself
Technology has aided our lives in a variety of ways, from telecommuting to tools that make work easier. However, it has produced a culture of perpetual accessibility. The working day appears to go on forever. There are moments when you should simply turn off your phone and take in the moment.
Notifications on your phone disrupt your free time and cause stress in your body. So don’t text at your child’s soccer game or send work emails when you’re with your family. Make quality time feel like quality time. You will create a stronger habit of resilience by not reacting to work updates.
Workout & Relax
Find time for the important things in life even when we’re busy. Consume food, use the restroom, and take a nap. Yet, as our calendars fill up, one of our most basic requirements exercise is typically the first item to go. Exercise is a powerful stress reliever. It releases feel-good endorphins into your system. It can make you feel better and can even give you a one-two punch by placing you in a peaceful state.
Investing a few hours each week in self-care, whether it’s via exercise, yoga, or meditation. Start small with deep breathing exercises throughout your commute, a brief five-minute meditation session morning and night, or replacing consuming alcohol with a healthy method of stress reduction if you’re truly rushed for time.
Reducing Time Consuming Activities
To begin, choose what is most essential in your life. This list will be unique to you, so make sure it accurately reflects your priorities rather than those of others. Then, set strict boundaries so you can dedicate quality time to the people and things that are most important to you. It will be easy to identify
what has to be cut from the schedule from there. Establish guide-lines to keep you on track if email or internet browsing is causing you to lose track of time. This may entail shutting off email notifications and responding in batches at specific intervals throughout the day.
Restructure
We might become stuck in a rut and believe our behaviours are fixed in stone. Take a bird’s-eye view of your life and consider the following questions: What adjustments could make life simpler for you?
Rather than attempting to accomplish everything, concentrate on the things you excel at and appreciate the most. Everything else may be delegated or outsourced. Delegating may be a win-win scenario for both parties. This will provide them with the opportunity to learn something new while also allowing them to focus on their greater objectives.
Begin Small then Extend on it
When we take on too much too soon, it’s the same with work-life balance. If you want to modify a script in your life, start small and see if you can succeed. From there, you may expand.
Nurture Relationships & Health
Positive relationships and social sup-port aid in the development of resilience and the management of stress. However, nurturing and developing these takes time. Make spending time with your family, friends, neighbours, or loved ones a priority. Regular exercise has been shown to help people cope with stress, anxiety, and depression. Get adequate sleep at regular intervals, consume nutritious foods, drink alcohol in moderation, and stay away from illicit substances.
Consider the Consequences
We all have specific roles in our professional roles. Our success in those roles is dependent on our progress in the assigned tasks. To find out our biggest responsibilities, we should think of doing nothing for a week and imagine the consequences. Out of all the consequences, identify the items that will have the longest negative impact if left undone. The expected consequences define the importance of any task which in turn can help in identifying our biggest frogs.
Find Your Greatest Contribution
Once we have identified the things that can have the greatest impact and the longest consequences, we need to ask ourselves what is the task that we can do all day and it can prove to be of the greatest value to the company. Tracy suggests asking this question three times because those three tasks will consist of 90% of the contribution that we can provide our company. Once we have identified these three greatest contributions then we should focus on the three tasks to accomplish them at the earliest.
Do the Worst First
We should start by completing the task that we have been avoiding for the longest while. It is the task that appears to be the most difficult and tiring one. Once we accomplish it, we will end up feeling relieved, satisfied and confident to eat more frogs.
How to Eat that Frog?
If we want to eat the big ugly frog, then we should remember that we can never do it in a single bite. We will have to finish it bite by bite. The biggest task that we have to accomplish can never be done in a single sprint, we will have to complete it in several sprints. We should begin this task by asking ourselves ‘What initial task I can do to keep moving in the right direction?’.
The approach shared by Brian Tracy in ‘Eat That Frog!’ can be very effective in having a smooth workflow. It can help us in accomplishing tasks that can have a positive long-lasting effect on our professional and personal lives. I would love to know what you think is the best way to eat the frog.