6 Tricks to Achieve Better Work-Life Balance

6. Understand What is ‘Not’ Important

The first step to separating your work and personal life is to identify what is not important. Yes, you heard it right. What we do wrong is that we treat everything at the workplace as an emergency and everything personal as something that can be taken for granted, when it should be the other way around. Yes, your work is important but not everything has to be done today and every task doesn’t have to be completed right now. Set your priorities right by planning your time according to the urgency of the task, so that you know what to accomplish each day. This way when you get home you’ll have a strategy for the next day and ample time to give yourself some much valuable family time.

5. Plan Your Work Hours

The next step is to plan your work hours and stick to that plan. I don’t mean you should work four hours in a day if you have only that much work. I mean if you have a fixed work period of nine hours and you get in at nine o’clock in the morning, you must get out at six hours. After 6 pm, all work lest there is an emergency should be carried forward without any remorse to the next day. Saint Kabir might have suggested doing everything today, but the reality is everything you want to achieve in a week, can’t be done in just nine hours. You have to prioritize some things and similarly deprioritize others. It’s essential that when you return home, you don’t carry your work in your mind and start at the same place where you left it the previous evening.

4. Keep Work & Home Separate

Working from home doesn’t mean that you allow the two extremes of your life to mix. It is important for you -especially in this hybrid and digital world- to learn to shut off your work brain after a period. If you are thinking about work all day and cooking up new ways to solve that trivial problem that came up at the last minute are you really and truly free from your job ever?

3. Take Those Mandatory Leaves

Nowadays, it’s common for corporate employees to get a fixed number of mandatory leaves per year. However, nobody seems to avail them because, in the unrelenting rate race of this world, we apparently prefer taking leaves when it’s absolutely essential. Not taking unnecessary leaves is commendable but that doesn’t mean you wait for yourself to be carried off in a stretcher out of the workplace.

Our body and mind need periodical rest and it is an art to accept when we need a reprieve from our never-ending work. Watch a movie, sleep the weekend away, or take a week off to visit that hill station you always wanted to. A regular getaway will also make sure you are fresh and efficient in the workplace when you return.

2. Learn To Say No

1. Your Work is Not Your Life

Work is a highly significant part of our life. Having a livelihood to support yourself and your family, putting food on the table, and making arrangements for when you retire are all dependent on that paycheck at the end of the month. But at the end of the day or rather at the end of the month work is just that – a part of life. We need to understand -especially in the post-pandemic world- that work is not our entire life. The best time to live is today and not thirty years later when you might have ample savings but no energy to use them.

So do work but don’t just do work. Live your life to the fullest. Go hiking, take swimming lessons, take a sabbatical for writing, or just do what you’re passionate about. Understand that your life is your own, and nobody else can and may live it on your behalf. Then and only then can you give your best at work as well as in life. Having just fruits in the diet doesn’t make a person healthy. You need every food item and that too in balanced amounts. That’s what makes the plate full and your heart content.