In a world where the professional and personal demands of our lives often collide and compete, we long for more balance. Work-life balance is a common plea of overworked and overwhelmed employees – male and female both. It is an expectation of the upcoming generation who are not willing to sacrifice fulfilling personal lives for the sake of their careers.
Progressive companies recognize that addressing this critical need will attract and retain healthier, happier employees and increase productivity and profits. While these companies may offer options such flexible working hours, it is up to employees to decide what balance means to them and take action to improve that balance.
Perfect balance will never exist and chasing after it only contributes to the frustration and dissatisfaction we sometimes feel. Instead, it is small, conscious choices we can make each day that lead to stress and more success.
Before you can begin to strive for more balance, identify and prioritize what’s most important to you, such as your career, family, home, relationships, finances, health, spirituality, personal development and fun. Are you nurturing each of these areas in a typical day, week or month? What needs more attention? What might you do differently to get better results?
The following 7 smart Work-life balance strategies can help manage your mindset, energy and time to support your balance.
- Get on Purpose
Why are here and how does your work and life support that? What are you most passionate about? What brings you joy? When you know your life purpose, you’ll increase your confidence, feel more fulfilled, and make better decisions about where to spend your time and energy.
Write your life purpose statement down, post it somewhere you’ll see every day and refer to it often for guidance.
- Create the space
Clutter distracts and confuses us. It drains our energy and keeps us from doing what matters most. While we often think of physical clutter, like a messy office and overstuffed closet, there is also technical clutter, like your over-reliance on your cell phone and too much time on the internet, and emotional clutter, like regrets and toxic people in your life.
By cleaning out the clutter of unnecessary obligations and other forms of clutter, you’ll think clearer, have more energy, and be open to opportunities, people and ideas.
- Manage your energy
Even more important than time management is how you manage your energy. Making empowering changes and maintaining healthy habits take vitality and commitment. It is important to make conscious choices every day.
Start with the basics, including eating healthy, drinking plenty of water, being physically active, getting enough sleep and finding time to relax and recharge when you need it.
- Positive Self-Talk
Studies show that we speak to ourselves 10,000 times a day and 80% tends to be negative. That is because we are programmed to protect ourselves by anticipating worst-case scenarios. Affirmations or positive self-talk helps counter those negative messages with empowering ones.
A simple affirmation such as: “I have more than enough time and energy to get the important things done today” will make you more calm and confident and prompt you to delegate and cross off unimportant tasks.
- Be Authentic
When your thoughts and actions conflict with the truth, you waste precious time and energy and tarnish your reputation. By increasing your level of integrity in thought, word and deed, you will transform all your relations, including the one with yourself.
Make sure your goals are what you want and not what you think you should do to please someone.
- Stay Present
Because our brains are sequential processors, we lose time and make more mistakes when we multitask. Staying present is about enjoying what is right now, instead of lamenting the past or worrying about the future. By being more mindful, you can reduce stress, capitalize on opportunities that might have eluded you, and increase your satisfaction with work and life.
- Cultivate an attitude of gratitude
What you focus on expands and what you appreciate appreciates. That is why it is important to cultivate that attitude of gratitude.
Keep a gratitude journal and make a brief list of what you are grateful for that day with at least one unique entry to increase your awareness. This simple practice will increase your positivity and put your challenges in perspective.
Even of one these strategies can improve your work-life balance and together, they complement each other. Start with the one that resonates the most with you and then add another until they all become habits that support your success.
In deed this 7 smart work life balance strategies will help me to manage my mind, my energy as well as my time and the result will support my daily work and automatically creativity will increase the product.