Let’s face it. You are sacrificing your personal life and health for your professional commitments.
Work-life balance is clearly missing from your life. We have left the days of 9 to 5 behind – a long way back and entered the new world of executives: a world that uses a different clock. A clock that works 24/7.
You devote all days of the week and almost all hours of each day to your work.
But, what if I tell you that you can maintain perfect work-life balance this year? I bet you are interested in knowing how. So read on to find out the New Year’s resolutions you can make to improve your work-life balance.
Stressed out juggling career and family commitments? Here are some interesting work-life balance ideas.CLICK TO TWEET
Set Up Regular Family Reunions
Make family reunions a regular affair. It can be weekly or monthly. Just set aside an hour or so in your weekly schedule. Use this time to have an open discussion in which you can set expectations for your personal life. Also, discuss with your family what they expect from you. Plan short term, or weekend outings during the discussion so that everyone can make arrangements to manage their other responsibilities accordingly.
Rearrange Your Routine
If you feel that 24 hours are too few for a day, then try to make your days longer. Yes, it is possible. Start by getting up early. Start work earlier in the morning and even get to your office earlier. This way, you will be able to leave the office earlier in the afternoon and have more time to spend with your family.
Adopt The Home Office Concept
Today, we live in a virtual world. Why not take advantage of that? You can ask your boss for permission to work from home. This would help you save the time you spend on commuting. It will also improve your health and reduce your stress and frustration as you don’t have to battle traffic and can also stay protected against outside pollution.
Make Vacations a Yearly Ritual
Vacations are the perfect time to fill in the gaps created in your personal life due to your hectic schedule. Make New Year’s resolutions to set aside a week or two for undisturbed family time. Inform your superiors, colleagues, subordinates, and the clients about your vacation plans in advance.
While you are away on vacation, do everything that you have been missing. Play with your kids, and give undivided attention to your spouse. This will help you maintain great work-life balance. And you will cherish these moments for forever!
Even when you are back to work, the happy moments you spent with your family will stay with you. According to a study conducted by the researcher at the Tel Aviv University, going on vacation can help you avoid stress and reduce the risk of burnout.
Remember, it’s not just you who is facing difficulties maintaining proper work-life balance! Patrick Pichette, Google’s CFO, faced a similar situation too and announced that he was stepping down to focus on personal pursuits.
By now, you must have attended umpteen seminars in which the importance of work-life balance was stressed upon. But its likely you were never told how exactly you could go about it!
Now that you have learned these New Year’s resolutions to keep both your career and your family happy, take the proper steps to implement them. Begin the new year with great joy at home and prosperity in your career!
If you have better New Year’s resolutions ideas to improve your work life balance, please leave a comment to share them with us.
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Some really good insights to help restore some regenerative balance, I’ve taken to waking up earlier in the day and getting a jump start on my day. The “extra” few hours in the morning give me uninterrupted time to get through a lot of important work. The pay off for my early start is I’m already in a productive mindset when I’m joined by my colleagues, and most importantly i am getting to finish earlier more often than I used to and am spending that time with my loved ones.
Dear Akil, thank you very much for sharing your personal example. It is another great work-life balance strategy that our readers can apply. I think that the key to benefit from your idea is to make sure that you get enough sleeping time at night and that you are in line with your biological wake-up time. It is a fascinating topic as the biological wake up time depends on many factors incl. age and gender. See here: http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/2/5/e1501705
By the way, Akil, how do you make sure that you get enough sleep at night?