Work-Life Balance

What is Work/Life Balance?

The work part seems pretty self-explanatory. It’s what occupies most of our time during the week and sometimes on the weekends. Therefore, life represents everything else that is not work – all the details and activities that make up a personal life, such as:

  • Interacting with immediate family, extended family, and community.
  • Attending to a home and all that goes with it.
  • Enjoying hobbies, finding time for play and relaxation.
  • Seeing to personal health and well-being

Nine Tips Towards a Better Work/Life Balance

  1. Eat a healthy diet, take regular exercise, and get the sleep that you need.
  2. Separate work from non-work aspects of your life. Try not to take work home or when you go on holiday.
  3. Achieve flexibility and control over the dividing line between the work and non-work aspects of your life.
  4. Talk to your line manager if you are having problems achieving the right balance between work and home, don’t suffer in silence.
  5. If approaching your line manager doesn’t work, don’t give up; talk to someone else who can help. This could be the human resources manager or a counsellor.
  6. Stop feeling guilty. Nobody is the perfect worker and the perfect partner – we all have to make choices and compromises. Nobody has it all – whatever the movies or the magazines might portray.
  7. Make time for your family. Jobs come and go; your family is forever. Special events in your children’s lives – such as a birthday party or a school concert – will not come round again in that precise form and therefore should not be missed.
  8. Make time for your partner. It’s easy to take a partner or spouse – especially long-term one – for granted, but this person is more important to you than any job and hopefully will still be with you long after you’ve moved on from this particular job.
  9. Make time for yourself. Even if you love your work, you need a change. If you don’t enjoy your work. still more do you need to be good to yourself. So do what makes you happy, whether it’s seeing friends or attending a football match or going to the garden centre or indulging in a little retail therapy.