Although today’s business environment is exciting and full of promise and upward mobility, it also presents a high “burnout” risk for too-busy employees who find it difficult to maintain an adequate work-life balance.
Americans are the most overworked and least happy developed nation in the world; a great deal of this is owing to the fact that most employees find work-life balance difficult maintain as they are faced with greater workloads, quicker deadlines, and more multi-tasking. When you try to combine personal wellbeing, familial duties, and a demanding career, it can sometimes be difficult to keep all the balls in the air at once.
Fortunately, there are several simple ways to maintain a comfortable work-life balance and employees can get started by following these five simple tips:
Five Tips to Build and Maintain Work-Life Balance
1) Build “You” Time into Your Schedule
If you’re like most employees in the US, your schedule book looks like the alphabet came there to die. To-dos are scrawled across pages, crossed out, highlighted and squeezed into margins. It gives you a headache just looking at it. When your days are this busy, the only surefire way to ensure that you’re getting the “you” time you need is to pencil it in, right between your various meetings, lunches and presentations.
What you do and where you do it doesn’t matter so much as the mere fact that you dedicate some small amount of time every day to doing something you love, like sitting in the park and reading a book or taking a short walk. Doing this will go a long way toward preventing burn-out, boosting your focus and breaking your busy day into more manageable chunks.
2) Take Inventory of Your Activities
If you look at your daily schedule objectively, chances are you’ll find activities that don’t contribute much to the big picture and, instead, serve to drain your time, energy and resources. If an activity adds no value to your career or personal life, don’t hesitate to drop it.
Eliminating or consolidating wasteful activities can go a long way toward freeing up time in your day, decreasing stress and making you more productive, not to mention that it can make you much more efficient almost immediately.
3) Consolidate Errands
Nothing eats up your day quite as quickly as errands back and forth across town. Whether you’re running around for business or personal reasons, it’s undeniable that spending hours in the car or on public transit is not an effective way to use your time. To cut down on the amount of back-and-forth you do, make an attempt to consolidate errands into daily or weekly bricks.
Doing this will allow you to spend less time driving around the city and more time working on meaningful projects or enjoying time with family and friends.
4) Make a Schedule and Stick to It
It’s tough to get anything done if you don’t have a well-defined plan and, for this reason, the importance of writing up a schedule cannot be underestimated. Before you head into work every day, dedicate some time to thinking about how long all of your various projects will take you to complete.
Once you’ve done that, focus on eliminating distractions and getting those projects done in the previously determined period. Having a goal to work toward makes you more efficient and helps you consolidate tasks into daily chunks, which in turn makes it possible to leave work early, go for a run, spend time with the kids or do whatever else it is that you love.
5) Consider Telecommuting
Telecommuting has exploded over the last several years. Employees like it because it makes it easier to build and maintain a solid work-life balance and employers love it because their remote workers are happier, more efficient and less likely to quit. Ask your employer if there are any telecommuting opportunities within your office and, if there are, jump on them. Surveys show that the benefits of working from home include things like increased family time, less stress, fewer distractions and increased productivity.
For employees struggling to maintain a work-life balance, a work-from-home job position can go a long way toward promoting relaxation and making for a happier work experience.
Work-Life Balance Makes for Happier Workplaces
A great work-life balance isn’t just the delusional imagining of an overworked employee. Numerous studies show that an adequate work-life balance leads to career success, better health, lower rates of obesity and stronger families, not to mention more efficient, happy and productive workers. For this reason, it’s just as important to your company as it is to you that you develop a balance between your personal and work obligations.
In addition to small tricks like implementing a schedule, consolidating errands and penciling downtime into your day, bigger moves like seeking out a telecommuting job position can reduce stress and help you feel happier at work. It’s tough to be a great employee when you are frazzled and stressed and cultivating a positive work-life balance benefits the employee and the employer alike.
To learn more about telecommuting and remote workplaces, visit Allied Telecom today
