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Balancing work and family life

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There are no guidelines advising on how to live a balanced life. It is up to each one of us and our experiences to learn how to combine career, family life and friends into an integrated whole. The key is to be creative when developing solutions as you face the challenges of balancing the responsibilities and joys of your numerous roles. The good thing is that most of the same skills and strategies you already use at work such as planning, organising, communicating, setting limits and delegating can be also used effectively at home, in order to achieve both a personal and professional satisfying and well-balanced life.

Clarify values
No matter how busy you are, your life will feel in balance and you will feel less stressed when you act according to your values. To identify the most crucial ones, prepare a list of what is important to your life - not what you enjoy doing but what you want in your life to feel happy and fulfilled e.g. amazing work, love, family etc. When you finish your list go back over it and select let’s say six words or phrases. These are your critical values. Life will feel balanced when what you do, revolves around and includes these values.

Set limits at work
Sometimes even though you are a contractor and deciding how much time to spend at work, you may still end up with work running your life and overwhelming you. Like all of us, your career is important to you, but in order to stop work taking over your life you must learn how to set limits and accept the fact that sometimes, you will have to delegate tasks and establish time restrictions for yourself to which you will stick to. 

Set realistic goals and expectations
Setting attainable goals keeps us focused. Think of several achievable goals but do not be too ambitious. Discuss these goals with people whose support you require, or who will be impacted by the choices you make. Write down the goals and save them in your PDA or electronic appointment calendar “to do” list to receive reminders about them weekly.

Focus on doing what you do well, do what is within your control, and if you can, put off what you realistically cannot do.

Set priorities
Sometimes it’s easier for us to allow ourselves to feel overwhelmed, rather than taking charge and developing a priority list of things that we need to do. It is fundamental to set priorities in order to manage your workload and time effectively. Devoting time to both family and work and finding extra time just for us is not that easy, especially due to the many roles and responsibilities and we have to manage.

In order to set your priorities correctly it is important to know how to set tough and clear boundaries between your work and personal life. Setting these boundaries between your time at work and at home and trying not to combine the two, can prove to be challenging. However, by staying emotionally and mentally present when at work and at home, you will enhance your effectiveness at managing the tasks at hand. Being completely present for each situation and not allowing your mind to be at work while your body is at home (or vice versa), allows you to focus, be more productive and feel good about doing the best you can within the finite amount of time available.

Separate work from home life
At the heart of the work/life balance issue is the assumption (often true) that one’s job and personal life are separate and distinct. The inference is, that work is not a desirable aspect of life and that life’s satisfactions come from activities after one completes the work day. Again, all too often this is true.
Many of the corrective suggestions one finds center around changes employers can make, such as flex time, reduced mandatory overtime, and stress-reduction counseling. Employees are counseled to manage their time, seek equitable sharing of family responsibilities, and learn to moderate the effects of stress with meditation, yoga, and exercise.

All of the above are useful and helpful tools for better living. However, these tools have limited curative power as they moderate the effects of symptoms rather than impacting the fundamentals that generate dissatisfaction.

Manage your time
Even when we are efficient in using our time, we may not be effective - we “do things right” but we don’t do the right things. Often, we don’t bother with planning and scheduling activities that move us toward our goals, especially those ones that aren’t concrete. Goals that focus on the development of people (our relational goals) may be harder to develop master activity plans for, because they are day-to-day processes that are harder to identify and schedule.

Here is one way to manage time differently. First, define your goals, and then we ask yourselves these questions:

• How do my expectations either foster or interfere with reaching my goals?
• Am I balancing my concrete or “material” goals with my relational or “people” goals?
• How will I know when I have reached this goal?
• What do I need to do today to reach this goal?

Find a purpose in life
You should discover or re-affirm your life purpose, becoming clear on the states of being that bring satisfaction and joy and those that return frustration and disappointment. This step can be difficult, forcing you to face the need to change some aspects of your life. Further reflection involves an inventory of your passions and perspectives. When these fundamentals of life are known, you can easily restructure your life’s roles and responsibilities over time to be more aligned with your life purpose

Learn to let go
Guilt is one of the greatest wastes of emotional energy. It causes you to become immobilised in the present, because you are dwelling on the past. Guilt can be very debilitating. By introducing logic to help counter-balance the guilt you can better stay on course.

Stay in control
The last area to think about is what it means to be in control. Many times we feel we have more control if we do everything ourselves. However, this can keep us from reaching our real goals.

Think about delegating or dividing your workload to accomplish your priorities, needs and wants. As we think about change in this area, or act differently, we may encounter unknown values or unexpected perceptions or expectations about how work should get done, and what work should get done. Even though we may want to reallocate home or work tasks, we find ourselves resistant, as if we stand to lose more than we gain. Understanding the emotional satisfaction we get from performing certain tasks, and the power attached to some responsibilities, are important aspects of effectively delegating or dividing tasks.

Two things to remember to help you stay in control are:

• Be passionate
- What do you love to do? What activities so capture your attention and energy that you lose track of time while doing them? List these activities and divide it into groups based on the level of passion you feel while involved in them. For example, it may be satisfying to organize your work space and shred old files, but it may be joyous to sing in the choir. Look for common threads among the activities. Perhaps creativity is common to many, or adventure, or learning. When you strive to include your passions in your every day, you’ll have fewer days feeling overwhelmed and out of balance.

• Learn to say “no” (Be assertive)
- Sometimes it is hard to say “no”, especially at present, if you are a contractor in a constant need of extra money. An inability to be assertive may lead to you taking on tasks that interfere with the important aspects of your life and then make you feel resentful and guilty. It’s a well known fact that your family life may suffer if you take on too many commitments. Not only will you not get much done but also you might lose control over your life.

Work/life balance is not just a matter of the number of hours you spend at work or with family, though that is important. A balanced life feels right even when you’re very busy. The trick to life balance is to honour your fundamental components of a well balanced life.

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