Balancing Your Personal and Professional Lives
Key Learnings from this article:
Balance can be found in posture, gait, movement, seesaws, scales, and notably in our lives. Spending 8 hours away from home - to earn a living - is an integral piece of the life puzzle. The office is actually our second home. So, being at the office can keep you pasted to a computer screen, and a timely breather away from the office desk can be a fitting interlude to catch up with your loved ones. In fact, the balance between personal and professional lives can be a livewire to how your lives pan out. So how you break the monotony and cultivate a sense of connection to the ones who are close in heart, is more than just a feel good factor; it is a vital life skill.
In spite of the separation of “home” and “work” lives, we are reminded that we only possess one life. The presence of a place to commute each morning to function as a bread winner, has a secondary footing to one’s family. The nuclear family is the centerpiece or DNA of our “one” life, but the work factor – which is in fact a second home for some – makes up a good chunk of the 24 hour clock, individual effort and shared goals. So although there is a unique residency in each one of us - what we call life -, we can distinguish work and home as two “unequal” parts that nurture a personalized form of healthy living.
Personal Lives and Professional Spheres. ?
A personal life can be attributed to the private dimensions of an individual’s life that are kept away from the public sphere. It is the champion Cricketer Virat Kohli who once said “I feel only my friends and family need to know what is happening in my personal life”. While personal relationships can age well like casks of the finest wine, we are reminded that they are not passive vehicles, nor are they commonplace taxis. There are limousines to flourish in the holism of life.
Below are some tips for a good balance between work and personal lives.
1.??? Keep a Schedule
A work timetable clarifies your work engagements to not just time brackets, but also gives you a sense of fine control of time. Controlling your work ethic is an important element in the success of your work efforts and consequently personal life. Deadlines are milestones, but the biological clock should be anchored to a wall clock, while your endeavored deliverables should be intertwined to the fabric of your work ethic. Guess one way of seeing a schedule is to make a mini mental Gantt chart for your daily hours at the workplace, and to set goals that are achievable. You should also ideally know your best clocked hours – are you a morning person? How long are your timespans of highest efficiency? Are you meticulous in work, attributing a sense of urgency to timely tasks and keeping abreast of what is required of you, with one eye on the clock?
2. Grow into a role at work
You should grow in to a role in the workplace, to ensure that you flourish in the role that is expected of you by your employer. Growing means that you let the growth phase in any company groom a passion for the intended work; loving what you do is one way of letting the clock be a passive measure and to get personal satisfaction for the effort that you put in. A clear head is an uncomplicated heart – and that is paramount!
3.??? Harmonize your primary responsibilities
Harmony means balancing your work, play, interactions and personality. Work is the effort that is put in to engage in a formal role that is scripted by your employer’s work expectations, play is social media time or personal phone calls, interactions are the “Us Time” with your team - not necessarily talking work related topics- , and personality is channeling extroversion, introversion or being an ambivert, into a balanced work model during your daily work chores. Delegating work too is a practice that can improve your work harmony, while using smart devices for zoning out of work can be a prized interval of relaxation.
4.??? Not taking the work home
Good family men – and women - , do not take the work home. They don’t provide excuses for not answering a phone call on a Sunday morning but are upfront on why a good family life is essential for the healthy upkeep of one’s work ethic. You need to let yourself be programmed to let go of work during the weekend and enjoy the time with your partner and family. While some of the best scientists engage in work on Sunday afternoons/evenings to schedule a passage of time as preludes to the subsequent week’s work, that is entirely a personal preference. Still answering urgent and emergency phone calls should be a valuable intervention when things go wrong during the weekend break and managers with responsible duty sheets may require to be constantly just a phone call away.
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5.??? Embracing remote and hybrid work
Now many of the jobs advertised on job boards and employment websites, are designated as remote, hybrid and onsite. Remote work can be a stellar factor to being able to better balance your time, wearing your pajamas while having a constant supply of coffees and teas that can be appealing to an individual. Not commuting is a factor that strengthens the mindset to find remote work an inward and insular pleasure. Hybrid work gives a twin proportional calendar and that suits well for some individuals. Onsite can tarnish one’s remote-work ambitions, but having colleagues, donning work clothes, having a change from house sitting, networking and socializing, feed a feel good factor that makes the work miles into precious life fittings.
Etiquette to Microsoft Teams or Zoom meetings, is constantly evolving and humans are adapting more and more to equip themselves to the technological developments that facilitate work life, and the fusion of work life with personal spaces.
6.??? Know the schedules of your team
Knowing the work schedules of your colleagues and synchronizing your work factor to amalgamate your work with theirs is an essential skill. For example, Pacific Standard Time and Eastern Standard Time are clocked differently, and if you are from the Global South working for a US outfit, you need to schedule your work hours to synchronize with the team members in the US. Closer to home, even in traditional work hours, scheduling meetings to tally with the clocks of your colleagues, is an important criterion. The take home message is when clocks tally, it makes life a lot easier for collaboration and on-the-job team building.
7.??? Separate the two lives
Separating professional life with your personal life is a crucial life skill. If one is constantly engaging in work at home, that can nibble away your personal relationships and that is a crucial factor to a better balance of personal and work lives. The other side of the coin is too a visible factor – if you are calling your partner 8 times a day neglecting your work – that can have repercussions on the quality of the work, outputs, productivity and your work ethic.
8.??? Artificial Intelligence and Personal Lives
With ChatGPT now being virtuosos and polymaths, what is the etiquette of using AI to further the balance of professional and private lives? While yes, ChatGPT can be a learning tool to composing emails, writing essays and developing line after line of code, it can also help in penning a poem to your partner, make decisions in your personal life such as in finding gift options, and to ascribe meaningful ways to cultivate a rich personal life. There is very little romance in AI, but AI is an agony aunt of just about anything, from poetry to theoretical physics. So ChatGPT makes your office tasks easier and promotes ample time in your private and personal spaces.
Lessons to Learn
Success in personal life ripples onto professional life and working out a balance of the two is an integral factor for flourishing in life. Keeping a schedule, separating the two lives, being better synchronized with the clock, keeping a tab on your colleagues who you engage with for teamwork, taking breaks, having a breather to stretch, relaxing and calling your loved ones, using up your holidays wisely, and not taking the work home, are valuable inclusions for a good professional life.
The saying “All work and no play makes Jack a dull lad” resonates far. In fact, dullness can be the catalyst to underperform at work and to lose a sense of worth in the work that you put in. Work-and-play is not about walking the tight rope, only ensuring that you take ample time off to smell the roses.
A Beautiful Duet
In spite of being two branches of the life tree, personal and professional lives are both searching for a quantum or more of light – happiness. While balance is crucial, we humans, tend to let matters drift and scales tip. That is a big negative and we as employees should do everything in our power to shift the balance into a fair sharing, an equilibrium of personal and professional lives. It is the pop diva Mariah Carey who once said “If critics have problems with my personal life, it's their problem. Anybody with half a brain would realize that it's the charts that count”. As long as your work is placed at lofty altitudes – high up in the charts -, your employer cannot complain of any facet of one’s private life. In fact, you may be a party animal, a budding naturalist or a weekend triathlete, but such pastimes are irrelevant to the notion that you gave your best at the workplace. Mariah Carey had a duet with Whitney Houston titled “When you Believe”- similarly?the duet of personal life with professional landscapes, just needs an infusion of belief – and balance - to be the perfect symbiosis, but for some it will always be an?inseparable singularity, i.e. our one attempt at life.
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