The What & How of Work-Life Balance
- Kaajal Ahuja
- in
- Expert Advice
- |
- 05 Aug 2016
Work life balance. Let’s open the pandora’s box and deal with it.
As individuals become very competitive and ambitious, there is an increase in conflict between achieving success at work and at home, resulting in an increase in work-family conflict.
In the ‘Life of a professional’ survey conducted by LinkedIn and CensusWide, they surveyed more than 6000 students and professionals to better understand individuals across different stages in their career. They found that of this group of 6000 professionals, 36% of mid-career professionals said that they work 41-50 hours per week, 32% of this group are Indians. In India, the respondents who were happy with their work-life balance were senior professionals (49%), mid-career professionals (43%) and early professionals (48%). That’s a lot of unhappy people with poor work-life balance.
Here are some productivity hacks and lifehacks to improve your work-life balance or to maintain your work life balance.
- Plan your working day or week well: It is good to remember there are only 24 hours in a day. There is no point trying to do too many things in one day. Invest in some time management tool to ensure that the
important tasks are completed on priority and at times when you are most productive. - Plan to unplug any live digital free for one day in the week: With the availability of ‘always on and connected’ hand held devices, it has become possible to stay on top of work commitments and updates at all times. You need to decide if you really need to be connected at all times.
- Set the expectations straight with your team: With employees and team members distributed across the globe, you can easily get into the ‘presenteeism’ mode. In this state, you feel compelled to respond to email or return a call irrespective of the time. Identify these symptoms. If you in one such role, it will be a great idea to set the expectations on what is possible and what isn’t right at the beginning.
- Talk openly to address work load issues: Most people feel rewarded on getting additional work responsibilities as a result of a downsizing exercise. Assess the workload honestly. If it is too much, be prepared for an open chat with the boss man.
- Delegate effectively: Ask yourself if it is your job to do it. Look at the items on your to-do list. If there is someone else who can do it or can do it at 70% effectiveness as you can, then please delegate. You don’t have to do everything.
- Embrace technology for better productivity: Find interesting apps that can help you automate your routine tasks. The aim should be to automate or improvise on the routine items so that you can complete them in 50% of the time.
- Get your act together: Identify all habits and processes that are redundant and are killing your productivity. Replace them with new ones.
- Plan your family time: Ensure that you are spending sufficient time with your spouse and kids. The time spent with them can rejuvenate you and keep you going.
About the Author:
Sandhya Reddy is a leadership & transformation coach based in Bangalore, India. She is the Founder and Principal Coach at Chapter Two Coaching, a coaching consultancy that enables everyone from CEOs to work-from-home parents to achieve their goals by replacing self-imposed limitations with enabling stories. Sandhya’s services include Executive Coaching and Life Coaching.
Her recent Live Chat on the JobsForHer website was found beneficial by many of our ambassadors and users!
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About the Writer:
Kaajal Ahuja is a commerce graduate, who worked in the field of Customer Support first at HDFC Bank, and then at Dell International. During her 11-year career break, she spent four years volunteering as a Teacher at a government-run educational institution and also ran her own enterprise – ‘Hey Gorgeous’ – alongside, for 8 years. It was during her break that she discovered her love for writing, and is now back, working part-time as a Senior Content Writer at JobsForHer. She is married and is an upbeat mommy to a 13-year-old.
