You might hold the opinion that working from home, especially during this malignant pandemic, will help you stay afloat in your professional and personal life. However, you are highly mistaken. While you are working from home, you only have to answer to yourself. It might lead to two scenarios. Either you will not do the work within the set deadline, or you will overwork.
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Hence, tips for work-life balance become the need of the hour.
Have you understood why balancing remote jobs and personal life is more difficult than balancing in-office job life and personal life?
Let us explain it briefly.
Most people tend to leave the work stress behind in their cabins while doing an in-office job. However, when people are working from home, they find it tricky to switch off the professional life and move on to enjoy the personal life. The lines separating these two areas of life get blurred during home-based jobs.
Signs indicating you are a workaholic – why can’t you manage both work and life?
There are chances that your obsession with work is why you can’t create a noticeable balance between work life and personal life. How will you understand if you are suffering from workaholism? Read the signs given below.
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1. You work extra unnecessarily –
The first and the most primary sign is working overtime when it is not needed. Even as an online tutor, you spend hours after hours preparing for your next batch even though you already have a sound knowledge of the material. It is applicable if you are a virtual assistant too. Try to notice if you do overtime every week for your client. It is not healthy.
2. You can’t keep yourself away from work at all –
The next sign is your inability to switch off the work mode and switch on the fun, normal, personal life mode. Have you been thinking of work again after having finished the assigned work? Do you have strong urges to spend a few hours more on the work that is not due any time soon? If yes, then you are having trouble maintaining a work-life balance.
3. Your body can’t bear with the work obsession anymore –
Another sign is your body’s answer to all those long hours at work. If you are skipping meals to finish the workload early, and if you are munching on junk food to keep you going on and on in your work, the time has come to google the different ways to maintain a work-life balance. Your body will give hints that it can’t cope up with your addiction to work.
4. You are suffering from problems in relationships –
You need to figure out the easy ways to maintain a work-life balance immediately if your relationships with your near and dear ones are getting strained because you are obsessed with work. Are you neglecting your family? Do you not spend time with your children anymore?
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5. Your self-worth is dependent on how well you do in work –
The last sign is if your self-worth is dependent on the success of your work only. If you had been balancing work and personal life, you might not have given full authority to your professional life to decide how worthy you are of happiness.
The list of simple ways to maintain a work-life balance –
1. You don’t need to be perfect all the time –
Being a perfectionist isn’t anything wrong or bad. However, while chasing perfectionism, we often forget to enjoy the little moments of happiness in life. You can’t be a master in every aspect of your life. It sounds harsh, but you have to accept this truth. Don’t restrict your time to school work, passion projects, and work only. Enjoy life while you still can. Try to work for excellence, not perfection.
2. Unwind and unplug from all the chaos in your professional life-
Work creates a lot of pressure in your daily life. You might be thinking about the next marketing assignment while doing the current marketing assignment. You will be miserable, tired, and extremely stressed. Hence, we urge you to unwind once a week, at least. Make a self-care routine for yourself and reset your personal life.
3. De-stress by meditating and exercising daily –
There are certain things that all of you do regularly. For example – you eat, sleep daily, drink water daily, etc. These actions do not reduce the stress level. However, exercise and meditation can effectively bring down your stress level.
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4. If possible, ask yourself about the changes you can make in your life to stay balanced –
Life can be monotonous at times. We often fall into a rut and struggle to recover from it. Now that you all are working from home, balancing your personal life and work is of utmost priority. One of the easy ways to stay on top of things in your personal and professional lives is to stay organized. How do you do that? You can take a small step like personalizing your home workspace according to your needs.
Can technology help in maintaining a work-life balance?
Technological advancement has changed how people do their work tremendously. Nowadays, you don’t need to undergo the usual hustle and bustle to go to an office meeting. You can easily take part in it via Skype, Zoom, and Google Meet. You can access various computer software created for your business.
For example – you have software or an app called Notion. It acts as a customizable bullet journal. You can easily organize any part of your life without knowing how to do the aestheticisms. From medical students to young entrepreneurs, everyone is using Notion and Trello to keep their professional and personal life balanced.
Like there are upcoming technologies meant for global change, you have technologies for work-life equilibrium.
More examples and tips on how to maintain work-life balance –
- If you find it hard to concentrate on work while doing the work and focus on the personal or recreational activities while doing them, you need to use the Pomodoro technique. This technique will help you concentrate on the task you are doing at the moment. It will reduce distraction and hence create a balance. For example – 25 minutes of work and 5 minutes of relaxation, so on and so forth.
- Take leaves and vacations from time to time. Everyone deserves a break, including you. Don’t beat yourself up for not doing work all the time.
- Lastly, we would like to emphasize again how essential self-care or me-time is. Until and unless you do what you love the most besides working, you will feel trapped in life. It isn’t healthy for marking a balance between your work life and personal life.
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Summary –
Now that you know how you should maintain a work-life balance, you must have realized how tough it is. We have provided you with more than enough different ways to maintain a work-life balance. One last tip for you from our side is that you should not decide to take long steps or make drastic changes to your routine to maintain a healthy work-life balance.
We are all familiar with the New Year resolutions that last for six months maximum. We are all familiar with how we plunge into crash diets which fizzle out by the second week, maximum. So, we advise you to take baby steps towards striking a balance between your work and personal life.
Why do small steps matter so much more than drastic steps?
When you take a small step towards your goal, you are more likely to complete it. Completing it will motivate you more to try it another time. The cycle goes on and on that will eventually make you realize that you have created the much-needed balance in no time.