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Torn between your professional and personal life? Here are 5 tips to strike a balance

As women, we may find ourselves at a crossroad in everyday life. If you want to know how to achieve work life balance, here are some tips.
work life balance
Balance is important. Image courtesy: Shutterstock
Sheetal Shaparia Published: 1 Sep 2022, 03:07 pm IST
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Managing work and life is challenging and can become hectic for everybody. Spending as much time as possible trying to make a headway in your career seems like an apparent move when everyone around us starts measuring our worth by the success of our professional career. However, if you cannot strike a balance between work and personal life, you will find that one spectrum of your life intrude into the other. And this can lead to discontentment, the tension in the family, and the inability to function at one’s best. Come, let us discuss how to achieve work life balance.

Careful planning needs to be done to ensure work-life harmony and increase productivity.

Women and multitasking
Women are considered great multi-taskers. Image courtesy: Shutterstock

Tips to achieve work life balance

Here are a few things to keep in mind to ensure that your professional life doesn’t affect your personal life.

1. Time management

It seems contrary to achieving the desired goal that you spend time planning your day. But time management is important. Our responses to stimuli are different, and therefore, there is no hard and fast rule that you can follow about managing your time. But if you take a few minutes to think through your day and plan your activities as per your needs and suitability, it will make life easier.

The concept of ‘work from anywhere’ is particularly detrimental to segregating work-life timing. And when work and living space merge, it is often difficult not to reach out to work. Having that inner discipline to not work beyond and before a certain time helps. And although it is so easy to start working from the comfort of your bed, having a designated workspace will help you manage time better.

2. Follow a schedule

If you cannot recount what you have achieved in a day or week, you might spend your time in a blur, doing one task after the other without much to show for all the time. Planning and sticking to a schedule will show you what you do with your time. Set priorities and create a schedule around these priorities. There has to be a designated time allocated to work and personal life that you follow. Learn to say no to expectations from work or even your loved ones. This will ensure you don’t get caught trying to play catch up.

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Make the most of the hours in a day! Image courtesy: Shutterstock

3. Say no to procrastination

Procrastination is a common obstacle many people face. You know you have a tight schedule, but you wait until the last hour to complete it and allow your work and personal life to merge because you are habituated to procrastination. Once this habit starts, it’s challenging to kick. If you are someone who looks at tasks or assignments and baulks at their enormity, breaking things down to achievable goals will set you rolling.

Whenever you find yourself procrastinating, you can also think of how much free time you will have after this task is done and how you will spend that time. Reward yourself by doing things you love once a certain task is done on time. A habit is cultivated over time and repeated actions. If you teach your brain not to hesitate and start working on a task, your mind will learn.

4. Avoid distractions

Do you find yourself going from one email to the other or sifting through messages and getting overwhelmed by work? You must surely have experienced your cell phone getting off with an alert and getting distracted. And yet, merely checking the emails/messages doesn’t get work done.

Suddenly it is 2 hours past. You will be amazed at the number of distractions around you and how much time they consume. Help yourself to be more productive and manage time by switching off notifications on your phone or computer. You can also keep your phone silent and close certain windows until a task is completed. Create a clutter-free workspace, and ensure that you limit physical distractions, to help you achieve work life balance in the interim.

Distractions at work
Avoid distractions to improve work life balance. Image courtesy: Shutterstock

5. Set boundaries

Wondering how to do set boundaries to strike the balance between your personal and professional life? Here are some tips!

* Limit work/life overlap by creating boundaries. You can choose not to entertain work after a certain time.
* Ask your family and loved ones not to interrupt you while working unless it is an emergency.
* Set at least one day a week to spend on yourself or your loved ones without any work distractions.

Pro tip on leading a balanced life

You can take many steps to ensure that your professional life isn’t affecting your personal life. If you have a challenging professional life constantly seeping into your personal life, it might be time to cut back on certain tasks or aspects of your life. Standing up for yourself around your work and personal life will ensure that neither affects the

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About the Author

Sheetal Shaparia is a Life Coach who helps people in terms of love, money, career, happiness and experience the peace of knowing the right path to travel in life. ...Read More

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