What Prevents Us From Balancing Work And Personal Life?
A study was done by the American Sociological Review recently found that as much as 70% of the US workforce is unhappy with their work and personal life balance that they are living with. It is so uncommon that many Americans think of the idea of having a balanced work and personal life is more of a myth than something that they can obtain.
Technology’s Influence In Balancing Work And Personal Life
The Problem: Technology allows us to bring our personal life to work in our work life home.
Americans used to be able to balance their work along with their personal life a lot better in the past. The reason for that is the absence of the type of technology that we have access to today. Smartphones make it nearly impossible to shut ourselves off from the world.
These devices make it easy to bring your personal life into the workplace. Likewise, it’s just as easy to continue emailing long after your shift has ended.
These are the realities that we face on a daily basis. These are the reasons why it’s so hard to shut off one aspect of our lives when we try to concentrate on the other.
The Solution: Shut yourself off from your personal or work life when you are concentrating on the other.
The most obvious way to fix this problem is to turn off your cell phone when you are at work and don’t check your email when you are home. This, however, may not be the most practical solution for everyone.
Although you may not be expected to check your work email when your home, people may be relying on you to do that. Likewise, you could be letting people down by not responding when they send you an important text while you are at work.
The best middle ground for this is to learn how to manage your time for these conflicting work and personal life activities. When you are at work, for example, try to only check your phone every couple of hours. Turn off the notifications so they do not distract you from your work. When you are able to take a quick break at work, that’s a good time to check your phone.
When you do check your phone, keep your replies short and only answer the important messages. You should also try to avoid starting a conversation with anyone. Make sure they know you are at work and you have more time to talk when you get home.
When you are at home, focus on reading through your emails, but not answering them. Think of it as a work life balance questionnaire, more so than something you have to respond to.
If something is an emergency, go ahead and answer it. If it is something I can wait until you are in the office, put it on hold until then. By checking your emails and not responding to them, you will be able to scan for any important updates without committing a lot of your personal time to your job outside of the office.
If you reply to an email, make sure you state that you will be able to follow up with them when you are in the office tomorrow. This will prevent the recipient from engaging in a back-and-forth with you while you are at home.
Technology is not the only reason people find it so hard when they are balancing work and personal life against each other. Another thing that makes the so difficult for us is multitasking.
Multitasking Can Be Counterproductive
The Problem: Multitasking is too easy. We are encouraged to multitask, which prevents us from concentrating on anything at all.
Another reason behind this struggle is our propensity to want to multitask. Although multitasking seems like an efficient way to get tasks done, it is actually counterproductive.The truth is, when you are focused on multiple tasks at the same time, it divides your attention between each of them.
Instead of getting things done twice as fast, you are slowing down your ability to focus and get through things at a normal pace. Multitasking only makes stress and work life balance even worse.
This is another one of our work life balance examples that are related to technology. It’s so easy for us to find ourselves in a situation where we are attempting to listen to music, keep up with three simultaneous text message conversations, follow up to an email, and read your work reports all at the same time.
When we do this, it creates major distractions and makes it difficult for us to focus on any one thing. The result is that you will not be able to retain any new information that you are learning while you are juggling all of these tasks.
The Solution: Focus on one task at a time.
By focusing on one task at a time, you will be able to knock out more tasks faster and at a higher quality than otherwise. When you put your full attention on one specific thing, the end result will be your best work. Not only that, but you will be able to get through it a lot faster than you otherwise would be able to.
This also involves keeping out the distractions. When you are reading the report, turn your email off. When you are checking your email, don’t pause to check your phone.
As far as the balance between your work and personal life goes, don’t try to multitask your job together with your personal life. By letting personal distractions in, it will negatively impact the quality of the work that you do. By allowing work to leak into your personal life, it will have a negative impact on your personal relationships.
Final Takeaways
The main Takeaway here is if you want to be able to balance your work life together with your personal life, you have to be able to separate the two. Don’t carry one over to the other. As long as you are able to do this, the end result will be more satisfaction in each phase of your life.
When in doubt, try to emulate what life would be like before technology took over our lives. People were a lot more satisfied with the work to personal life balance that they had back then because when they began one, they had no choice but to shut off the other.
