How I create a work life balance
Work life balance is a delicate subject. Everyone seems to have an opinion on it.
Even the term ‘work life balance’ is debated. I prefer ‘work life harmony’ myself.
For me, it comes down to one simple thing. Am I doing something each week that achieves my overall vision for the life that I want to lead? If the answer is yes, then the balance tends to be good. If it’s no, then the week needs reassessing.
The thing is, it varies every week. It’s not like you set the balance and then leave it and in a few months everything still applies the same way. No. For me it’s actually a weekly thing.
Why? Because weeks turn into months, and months turn into years. And before you know it, a whole year has passed you by and you can either say you achieved it, or you haven’t. Plus, I’m a ‘completer finisher’, so I like to make sure things get done.
In order to work out my optimum work life harmony for the week, I remind myself of my overall vision and goals.
For example, let’s say: “I want a career change”
This vision breaks down into a few high level goals:
Identify skills gaps between where I am now and where I want to be,
Plug those skills gaps with new knowledge,
Build connections with people in the area that I want to work,
Look for opportunities to gain experience.
When you’re clear on your goals, you break them down further into more manageable activities and tasks. For example in step 2, you might break this down to:
Read 3 books on the topics of X, Y, Z and look for opportunities to apply learnings from them over the course of the next 6 months.
For me this activity would become a task on my weekly planner that said ‘spend 10 minutes reading every day’. In a previous post, I mentioned that I like to use habit stacking in order to build in new habits into my day, which really works for me. So, I will look for another activity that I can stack this reading task onto, e.g. once I log off from work, I will sit in my favourite chair and read for 10 minutes before picking up my children from their respective settings.
Then I basically do this for all of the goals, breaking each one down individually and making sure I capture this activity somewhere, so that I don’t have to do it in my head. Each week, I ensure all the tasks are logged onto my weekly plan and then I can track them easily and quickly. I wrote about how to create a weekly plan here in case you find it helpful.
And that’s it!
I don’t have time to make life complicated and learn how to use multiple apps and software to make my existence easier. I just go with simple, and that works for me.
How do you manage your work life harmony? I’d love to hear your approach.
-Selda
Today’s image from DALL-E: work life harmony