Work-life Balance: Hacked
Productivity tips for better work-life balance
Time has changed a lot and who would have thought that our way of working will change in such a drastic way and in such a short span of time? From the time of writing this article in 2022, just a couple of years back in March 2020 world was struck by the Covid19 pandemic. In a matter of days, everyone was locked in their own spaces. The journey from then to now has not been easy for any of us; everyone went through their own challenges.
How it started...
With everyone stuck in their homes, the regular business model of working from the office would not have worked as a result businesses had to be adapted to the changing times and needed to take a complete shift from the old model of working from the office to working from home. This was an equally drastic shift for the people used to their old routines of office work to everyday working from home.
Honestly, most of the people were really excited to shift to working from the home model, no need to get up early, no travel, suited meetings changed to a pajama meeting, and the best, a lot of time to spend with the family. But like with every beautiful thing, the reality hits after the initial honeymoon period the same happened in the case of working from home. As time went through and when days changed to weeks and weeks changed to months and even months to years, people started getting more and more frustrated with the current working model.
How it's going...
Work from home changed to work for 24 hrs. People working from home started getting lesser and lesser time for themselves. The family with which we loved spending time within the initial days now resulted in frustrations and disturbance in the work. Deadlines became unachievable and even if we meet those, most of the time it was the result of working for ourselves. The work-life balance of people was certainly screwed
But don't you think many of these things were avoidable? Why can’t working from home remain the same forever as how it all started? Why can’t we just keep working from home and also maintain the balance between work and our life? These have always been in everyone’s mind but became more evident when everyone started working from home.
The answer to the above questions would be definitely, a big fat YES!!! But how? This is what we will take look further in this article. In this article, we will discuss some of the tips that can help you achieve work-life balance in this challenging time. With the office opening and hybrid workspaces becoming the new norm, these tips would have the same importance as before if not even more because one has to maintain the balance between the office and the home. Hope if not all but some of the following tips might help you to improve your work-life balance.
Have your own workspace
This is quite an underestimated thing when it comes to working from home. While working in the office we all had desks, cubicles, rooms, and corners allotted for yourselves. Even if not the office itself acts as the space where you just work. But when life completely shifted and people started working from home, we suddenly lost our workspace. Our home couches and beds took the place of our workspace. work from anywhere became the norm. While this was cool for the initial phases but slowly and slowly it started fading off. Not having a proper workspace not only took a toll on our productivity at work and also affected our body health.
Having a separate workspace will help you improve your focus on your work and as a result, improve your productivity. Sitting in the right posture while on a chair will also help improve your body's health. Many companies are realizing the same and are now providing budgets for their home office setup in their work-from-home benefits. I understand that not everyone can have a separate space allotted to work and it's fine. It's not necessary to have a fancy office table and chair to start with even if I didn’t have one. In that case, your workspace can be any corner of your home. You just need to have one undisturbed space allotted for yourself where you can JUST WORK. And this will work wonders for your productivity and improve your work-life balance.
DND Mode
Here DND stands for Do Not Disturb. Having a workspace was the first step toward having a great work-life balance. But having a quiet workspace is even more important. Quite and undisturbed space will help you focus on your work and work itself. when you start working on some stuff, you will know it generally takes some time to just get into the zone of working, and only then one will be able to leverage its peak productivity. Having a separate workspace will help cut off and get into the zone and having a quiet workspace will help you achieve your zone faster.
DND Mode starts from home. It may sound politically incorrect and even rude at some times to tell your friend and family to be quiet around when you are working. Initially, this might result in some resistance, and eventually, they all will understand. But DND mode in the physical surroundings in this modern will just solve half of the problems. Another half of the problem is the devices around you. These days every smartphone provides you with some or the other version of focus modes. Try leveraging the focus modes to filter out unnecessary disturbance while working. With this, you are all guns ready to focus just on your work while your working hours.
Follow Pomodoro Technique
In the previous two tips, we looked into how having an undisturbed workspace can work wonders for your productivity. While this is 100 percent true but it may not be possible to sit in one quiet place for most of us and keep everything aside and just work for hours. Often while working in a focussed mode we want to come out of the zone and have a fresh breath or just a small distraction. But this becomes a problem when this often changes to every 5–10 mins as a result you may think so but never get into the real zone of working.
But no worries!! there exist a great simple enough technique to your rescue. Pomodoro is a simple time management technique that will help you to take most of your time. At first, it may not even sound like any technique but that is the beauty of this technique. As per this technique, one needs to do 25 minutes of the focused work and take 5 minutes of the work. But none will stop you from customizing this according to yourself, we can work for 50 mins and take 10 mins breaks. This will help you get into the zone as well as refresh your mind after the burst of focused work. To help you start adopting the Pomodoro technique there are many apps and browser extensions available.
Have a Fixed Calendar
Most of us think that we just don't have enough time for ourselves and thus our work-life balance is screwed. More often the lack of time is not the main problem for most of us but the main problem is the lack of time management. If we take a simple look at many successful people in life, do they have less work than us, NO!! The only thing that differentiates us from them is time management. Better management of your time will not only result in a better work-life balance but will also help in achieving your other goals in life.
Good time management is not rocket science. Time management starts with creating a calendar for yourself and allotting specific times for a specific task. It seems to be a very difficult job at the first look of it and it is completely normal. One best way you can start with setting and following your own calendar is using a window of time for specific tasks which will fix the boundaries for that task as well as allow you to be flexible enough to include important tasks. Slowly and slowly this will become your normal routine to follow and having a good work-life balance is easier than ever.
Start Early
For most of us, work-life balance becomes an issue when we don’t manage our time properly as the result our work is never completed on time and it starts creeping into our personal time. Most of the time work-life balance is the issue when we had to work late in the evenings to complete our work. A simple logical solution to this problem is “JUST START YOUR DAY EARLY”. If you have an unbalance on one end then balance that out for the other end. If you start your day at 10 then start at 9 and if you start the day at 9 then start your day at 8. Believe me, this will make a lot more difference than you might think.
Accept It…!!!
The earlier discussed techniques will definitely help you to achieve your desired work-life balance. If not it will surely let you have control over your time and as the result, you less often feel lost. But even if you apply all the techniques there will be still days when you will feel lost and for one or the other reasons, your work-life balance is affected. The only solution to this will not be to run from it but to accept it. Life is full of imperfections and it is impossible to control every part of life. Those days when you work hard to balance everything and you still find yourself in situations where your work-life balance is screwed we should just accept and try balancing those with the lighter days. One thing we should never stop is our pursuit of perfect balance.
The above pointers are based on my experience but these are not hard and fast rules. Some may work for you as it worked for me and some may not. There may be many more of these and let us keep the conversation open by commenting on what worked for you and what did not.
If you loved my work please like and share this article(and it’s free :)). Also, do follow me for more articles like these.
Also, check out my other work…
