Juggling a Career with a Personal Life
Jason Borrevik’s Three Pieces of Advice for Maintaining a Stable Work/Life Balance
The challenges of maintaining a healthy, stable balance between one’s career and one’s personal life are daunting in today’s professional world.
There was a time, now nearly a distant memory, when one’s job ended at five o’clock and one’s family or personal life took precedence until the next morning. Except for the odd night spent working late or weekend strategy session, evenings and weekends were meant exclusively for significant others, children, and friends. There was a quiet understanding that these were times when a career took a backseat in importance to the cultivation of hobbies, or rest and relaxation, and that 40-plus hours over the course of five days was enough time devoted to work.
This, of course, is no longer the case. Now, with telecommunications being as advanced and ubiquitous as they are, clients, customers, superiors, and co-workers alike can correspond at any time of day from any location worldwide. More and more, career professionals are expected to be, in some form or another, ‘on-call’ for nearly all their waking lives. Maybe not for large blocks of time, but generally, if an email is sent, a timely reply is expected. If a request for information is made via text message on Saturday night, a response is expected before Monday morning at the office. So, in such an environment, how does one juggle the demands of a professional career with a healthy personal life? Or the responsibilities of a family life?
Here are three pieces of advice that Jason Borrevik has found to be quite useful in accomplishing just that.
Identify Priorities
The identification of one’s priorities in life is the necessary first step in maintaining a stable work/life balance, and it is also a useful exercise, generally. Priorities, of course, vary from individual to individual. A professional who is also a newlywed may wish to prioritize time spent with their spouse in the early part of their marriage. Anyone with small children is likely to prioritize quality time with their family. Perhaps a professional is training to compete in a sporting event and must dedicate a certain amount of time during the week to training — the point is, time must be put aside for whatever it is that one values.
Jason Borrevik explains that modern life is all about time management. The reality is that most of us will have to embark on a career in order to pay the bills and provide for our futures. Outside of that, determining what else is of paramount importance to an individual is the critical first step to maintaining a healthy work/life balance.
Understand Individual Situations
This is perhaps the most important — and tricky to master — of the three pieces of advice. There will inevitably be times when one’s career and one’s personal life come into conflict. In those instances, it is critical to be able to differentiate between what is and what is not of paramount importance.
Does a meeting with a client conflict with, say, a child’s Little League game or piano recital? In considering what to prioritize, numerous factors must be considered. It is the client brand new, or at risk of abandoning their account? Is it the final meeting to close an important and lucrative contract? If any of these things are true, one must consider favouring meeting with the client. But one must also consider the other end of things. Is it the child’s championship Little League game? Is it the child’s final piano recital? If so, it’s quite possible that no meeting under any circumstances is more important. In short, one must be able to identify the nuances of a given situation, weigh the pros and cons on each side, and then act accordingly. Jason Borrevik notes that this is a difficult skill to master, but one that pays gigantic dividends in the effort to achieve a work/life balance.
Switch Off
This is the easiest and most straightforward of the three pieces of advice: when in doubt, unplug. Is too much workplace stress creeping its way into your down time? Switch off your phones and devices. Is your relationship with your family or significant other suffering because of overwork? Do not open your business email account. Is your health suffering because you are made to be constantly available on evenings and weekends by your employer or superior? Ignore the text messages and speak with them in person at the office. There are a few things in this world that justify fending off the intrusion of work into one’s personal life.
In the end, there is no one magic answer to achieving a healthy, stable work/life balance. Rather, Jason Borrevik believes that the answer to the problem is in one’s approach to individual situations. By taking these three pieces of advice to heart, any professional will be better equipped to balance the demands of a career while preserving one’s health, personal time, and family life.
