Even During Busy Times
Even if you love your job, you need a good work-life balance to avoid burnout. But when your back’s against the wall and deadlines loom large, it’s easy to get overcommitted in the office, at the expense of your personal relationships and free time.
If this sounds like a situation you know well, here are some tips on restoring equilibrium between your professional responsibilities and the rest of your schedule.
Consider hiring a personal assistant to help with non-work tasks
There’s a good reason that the world’s most successful people have personal assistants by their side. With the right individual on-call, you can offload everyday life admin and give yourself the headspace you need to breathe easier and squeeze more out of personal and work duties alike.
You need to understand the difference between personal assistant vs. executive assistant before you make a decision. In short, the former can handle everything from buying groceries to updating your diary, while the latter will focus on admin for your job, including balancing the books and organizing get-togethers with colleagues and clients.
Remember to delegate
Being able to delegate is important. If you don’t hand tasks off to team members, and instead get caught up in doing everything personally, then you’re piling more pressure on yourself unnecessarily and also wasting the valuable resources that are already on tap.
Effective delegation will give you more time to use as you see fit, and will also be advantageous in terms of building trust with employees, as well as bolstering efficiency and productivity.
Embrace breaks
Another temptation which overachievers often fall for is that of slogging away at a project without stopping.
This might feel like the right move if you have targets to hit and a schedule to stick to, but in fact the longer you stay glued to a task, the less effective you’ll become.
Instead, adding breaks at regular intervals will give your brain time to reset, rather than allowing the fug of fatigue to descend.
The same rule applies to taking time off. Don’t work through the weekend, because this will only make you more sluggish and less capable of doing your job. Use downtime for decompressing and doing other things, and you’ll reap the benefits when you’re back at the coalface on Monday.
Adapt your work schedule around your personal life commitments
There’s nothing worse than having to call a rain check on an event outside of work that you’d been looking forward to because professional business has gotten the better of you.
This is why flexible working is increasingly popular, giving employees at all pay grades the opportunity to help their work and personal life coexist in harmony, rather than being in constant conflict.
If you are a business decision-maker in your own right, then applying the same rules to employees as you would to yourself will benefit the entire organization.
Turn off your phone
Work bleeds into time off whenever you get an email after office hours, or whenever you get tagged into a meeting while on vacation. The main conduit for this information is your smartphone, so to avoid the sinking feeling that this can produce, power it down when you’re not in work mode, or at least turn off notifications.
All of these tactics, when used collectively, will give you a work-life balance to be envied. It might be a struggle to get where you want to be, but once you’re there the journey will feel worth it and the rewards will keep coming.
Leave a Reply