Make Room For Family – Finding Work-Life Balance

If you can say you have a healthy work-life balance then you’re doing something right. After all, balance is a key to life.

But, unfortunately, not many people can claim success in this area. Finding balance is a common struggle for most busy professionals. All work and no play.

The good news is, you can find work-life balance. It’s not as difficult and elusive as it seems. Try these six essential tips:

Include personal tasks in your planner’s daily priorities list. When you sit down and write out your schedule, commit to having at least 2-3 non-work related activities each day.
Set and pursue at least 1 personal goal at the beginning of each month. Use your monthly calendar to schedule goal-related activities each week.
Track how you spend your time. At the end of each day, make a list in your planner of what you did and how long it took. Hopefully, you’ll have some personal, home, and family activities written down.
Increase your personal time by cutting back mindless TV and internet browsing that waste valuable minutes you could spend reading, talking with family, or doing household duties.
Minimize your commitments to others — you must protect your own time, because others won’t.
Eat well, sleep well. Live a healthier life and you’ll benefit through increased energy levels during off-work hours. Don’t go home and collapse on the couch, when you could be spending this time on important activities.

Yes, injecting more personal time into your life is essential, but not always easy.

Find your work life balance and get yourself on the right path to living a rewarding personal life with family, friends and self-interests, and you’ll be a more productive and stress-free employee.

Remember, having work-life balance requires that you plan your personal time the same way you do at work. Find a planner to help you track your activities at daytimer.com.

5 thoughts on “Make Room For Family – Finding Work-Life Balance”

Jeff , Love your articles! They have helped me with my planning. And, yes, they have helped me make creative use of Daytimer products! Keep up the good work! I really appreciate it!

Andrew, I used copy and paste into the word processor, but pasted as RTF (Rich Text Format) and Word took care of the rest.

Dear Jeff, I resorted to doing the copy and paste thing so that I could read the message. You have hit “the nail on the head”. We control our time until we allow other people or situations to take that control from us. I learned that the hard way… When my job starts to take over my life, it is time to look for a different job. When what is going on at home causes problems on the job, then it is time to do something about what is going on at home. Both situations require some reviewing, but most often, I found that all I really needed to do was ask for help for the problems at home or work to find ways to do what was needed efficiently and effectively. The key was in asking for help.