Can Work/Life Balance Be Achieved?

The idea of working from home sounds exciting—admit it. You have your equipment, the space you want, and you are ready, right? But wait, are you really ready? Here I’ll take a look at keeping your two worlds; your work life and your home life from colliding. Here, I will list tips and provide a checklist for getting and keeping your work/life balance.

First, some key tips to keep your worlds apart and still allow you to balance those worlds so that they work in tandem with each other, allowing you to feel like a whole person and not a robot simply because you decided to work remotely. The dichotomy of work-life and home-life is a precarious line to walk. And even more so, when you choose to work from home.

1) Don’t start working the moment you wake up. Create a morning routine in which you get up, exercise, get showered and dressed. Have breakfast the same way you would if you were heading off to work.

2) Get rid of “home-life distractions”. No don’t throw out your television. Simply close the door to the room where the television sits. Or if its in the room with you—unplug it.

3) Focus on your tasks. Decide what category your work tasks fall into: Urgent. Important. Urgent but not important. Neither urgent nor important.

4) Only work in your workspace. Working from home tends to make people combine home duties with work duties. People will often stop working to tend to some home chore in an effort to make creative juices flow. This process is not ideal for getting work done. Leave that home chore until AFTER you are off-duty.

5) Take breaks. Take at least 1 hour during your work day to decompress. Have lunch, take a walk. Clear your mind to find inspiration.

6) When you are off duty—make it official. Do not run back to your home office or workspace to tend to some undone task. Think of it in this way; would you leave home and drive all the way back to work to tidy up a misbegotten detail—or can it wait until you return to work the following day?

7) Once off-duty, make time to unwind. Have a “do-nothing” point between when you stop working and when your home life begins. This does not need to be a long stretch of time, about a half hour at the most. A transitioning from work to home.

Defining work/life balance: It’s different for everyone

Let’s face it, balancing work life and home life is difficult. Most define work/life balance as time working versus quality of life spent not working, but in equal measure. Some people are able to work up to 60 hours a week and still find time to be engaged in their home life. Others tend to lean toward the proverbial 40 hours a week to maintain the balance. Some jobs require long hours, for instance; doctors or lawyers, and for them, long hours are mandatory. But for others, working long hours is a choice. And because there are also people who subscribe to working long hours in order to get to some other aspiration; and for them this work/life imbalance is of their own making. But still, even they need to strike some semblance of balance. Click here for the work/life balance checklist.

There are five main areas of your life that make up the work/life balance ratio. Health, Work, Home, Leisure, and Creative. Take a look at the list and decide where you need to make changes to make balancing work life and home life feel good and work for you. If possible, try to keep an equal number within each category. If you cannot support an equal number, try to come as close to an even number within each category as possible to find balance in your life.

~By Sandra Redmond~