5 Easy Steps on How to Create Work Life Balance

It’s a New Year; Hope you have a successful 2022. Did you get the needed rest over the festive period? Now that you have hopefully relaxed a bit, there is another heavy year ahead (as always). So how do we make sure we get the work done, but also have time to relax and spend focused time with family and friends. I’m sure you’ve heard it before, work life balance. So, let’s see how we can create work life balance.

What is Work Life Balance?

Work life balance is really making sure you fit in all the work and social activities into your 16 hour day. (Of course, we need 8 hours to sleep). This includes eating, hobbies, time with friends and family, reading, work, exercise, playing with your dog, etc. But if you put all the things you want to get done into a calendar, you’ll often find you won’t have time to do them all. At least not at once. And this is where the balancing and trade-offs begin.

Why is Work Life Balance Important?

By not paying attention to your work life balance, you could either focus too much on the fun activities, and achieve nothing, or you could focus too much on work and burn out! If you are spending too much time on your PC without breaks, eating while working, and checking in at work when you are spending time with family, you are probably on the road to burnout. Humans just can’t do more than one thing at a time. If you keep trying to, it will feel like you are always working and getting nothing done. Let’s see some key aspects we can look at to increase our chance of this work life balance.

How to create a Work Life Balance Program

Whenever I find myself losing the work life balance, I force myself to sit back and do nothing for a moment. Breathe a little, and maybe meditate to empty my mind. It’s usually important at this time to go through the following five steps. Probably because I am doing things that I should NOT be doing.

What are the five steps to work life balance?

1. Find Your True Values

If you know your true values it will help you focus only on the things that make you happy right now. There are many values that we would like to have, but they are all too often not our current values. For example, I was part of a chess club and enjoyed it for years. But after time, I was just going out of habit and not getting enough from it. Even though I love chess, it’s just not a value right now. So I eliminated it from my schedule.

2. Plan the Time for your Values

Once you have your current list of values, make sure you eliminate all the non-values from your schedule. Every time you schedule your fun activities, make sure they are in line with your values. You’ll feel a lot better only doing the things you like to do. Make sure you schedule at least one fun activity per week or as often as you think you need it. (Of course if one of your values is family, you need to nurture that daily)

3. Ensure you make time for Stress Relief and Exercise

There will always be stress, but we simply need to find ways to eliminate it after a hard day’s work. For some this may be a conversation with friends, others it might be a glass of wine. For me, there is nothing better than getting on my running shoes and hitting the road. It seems to clear my mind and prepare me for the fun events ahead (Because we scheduled them remember!) It also has a good side effect of keeping me fit.

4. Use Important/Urgent to access a task

This is an important step that is aimed at your vocational work. Whether it is a job or a business, you need to eliminate unimportant tasks. Outsource or delegate anything that takes you away from the important. The way it works, place each task into the relevant grid spot below. If it’s important and urgent, you need to DO IT NOW! If it’s important but not urgent, schedule it for a time you can focus on this. If you are a morning person like me, schedule it in the morning. If the task is not important but is urgent, get someone else to do it. If you can, pay someone. And finally, if the task is both unimportant and not urgent, DON’T DO IT!

Also, schedule focus time in your calendar. A time where you will undertake important tasks each day. In this focus time, you have to remove all distractions. This includes phone, email, meeting requests, people. Only work on the important task at this time.

You can learn more about focus time here.

What is focus time? (5 ways on how to achieve more!)

5. Learn to say NO

By nature, most of us are people pleasers. We have an insatiable need to help others. But if this helping others is taking us away from our work and our values, we need to say NO.

Some tips on how to say no:

  • Say it in clear terms
  • Be assertive and polite
  • Be honest in your reasoning

Conclusion

Next time you feel trapped, as if you can’t escape what you are doing, just breathe and follow the steps above. You’ll start to realize you have more control than you think. Focus on your values.

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How Your Smartphone is Affecting Your Productivity and Focus?

Technology has become integrated into our lives and has had a massive impact on our relationships. Today we can be having a conversation with people physically yet be digitally focused on another conversation on our phone. This is the twenty-first century connected world. Our family, friends, and co-workers have devices and often are not totally present when we talk to them, simply because something else has their attention. It is something that has definitely escalated during the pandemic as people found themselves isolated and not able to socialize.

There is nothing wrong with reading a blog, browsing through social media, or even chatting to a friend online. But it does become a problem when we cant balance our digital lives with our physical lives. This is the point where we need to take back control.

Notifications, the Concentration killer.

One of the biggest problems with having mobile devices is the constant notifications that distract our attention. We naturally want to respond to them. As if they calling us to take action. It’s human nature. Who is that? What if it’s urgent? And we feel the need to check every beep and ping that pops up on our phones.

In your work environment, it can be difficult to maintain focus when you have multiple apps screaming for your attention. One way is to go into your app setting and disable notifications for certain apps like social media. It’s one way to help you focus more. And if you have a moment you can simply open your app to see if there are any notifications or messages that you need to attend to.

Find out : How Social Media Can Accelerate the Growth of Your Business?

Set Times for Social Media

Whether you use social media for personal or business purposes, it can be addictive! You constantly feel the need to see what’s going on in the world. Or what are our friends posting? And this can waste a lot of your productive time especially while you at work. One way to gain control of the way you use social media is to set fixed times for checking and responding to messages or posts.

This is far better than constantly being distracted by it throughout the day. It will also help you avoid wasting productive time on social media. In fact, setting time aside for just social media will help you be more productive with your time online. It’s all about focus and more focus means more productivity.

Know When to Put Your Phone Away

Smartphones dominate our lives. Everyone has one and we see people around us on them all day. But there is the point where you need to just put them away and focus on the people around you? Having your phone in your hand all the time, around family or friends can send the signal you are not a hundred percent available. So why not put your phone away in your cupboard and ignore it while you spending quality time with people that matter. It will in the long run add more value to your life and show the people in your life you present and care.

It may seem like a small thing, even silly, but breaking away from your phone can make a huge difference to your productivity both personally and professionally.

Why not give it a try?

Maybe you’ll be surprised at just how much better you feel!

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What is focus time? (5 ways on how to achieve more!)

What is focus time

Every one of us has 24 hours in a day. Why do some people achieve more results than others? As a manager in a software business, there are so many different aspects that I must keep my eye on. Project management, team management, client relationships and some more technical aspects. To deliver a project on time and with quality, I must divide my teams time and my time. So what is focus time?

Focus Time is a simple time-management technique that can change your life. The technique, when set up and implemented, requires you and your team members to work several defined short intervals. Outside of that time, you can attend to the clutter (emails, social media and other distractions).

Why do you need focus time?

Being able to focus on one thing for a well-defined period produces better work. It also helps get the work done quicker. With less noise, you also tend to have less stress and worry. If your mind is in a stress-free environment your creativity booms.

To be focused means you need to have goals and objectives defined. Once you know where you are going you can organise your time around achieving the goal is short, focused bursts.

How to get more Focus Time

In a complex work environment like today’s, each person must wear many hats each day. To find the time to focus can be a challenge. Here are some techniques I use myself and for my team. Later, I will show you a tool, RescueTime, that shows you where you spend your time, how much and for what periods of time.

1) Improve Self Belief

You need to believe in your own ability to follow through on a schedule. Focus becomes a lot easier when you can manage up and down and know the urgency at the moment. Most urgent tasks are not important and can wait for later. You need to believe in your ability to make the right call.

2) Get Rest

Not getting the right amount of sleep for you can lead to impaired cognitive ability. To set yourself up for success, make sure you get 7-8 hours of sleep each night.

3) Set Daily and Weekly Goals (Get accountability)

As a manager, setting the tone of what is important for the day or week will help your team to get their focus dedicated to the right tasks. By communicating and providing the schedule, it’s clear what needs to happen. There will be urgent issues that arise during the day and can derail a schedule. Working together and continually defining the focus will keep you on track.

4) Schedule in advance and with set focus periods

Once the goals and objectives are defined, it’s up to you to focus your own time. Getclockwise defines it like this.

Swerve, Stack and Schedule.

  • Swerve: Learn how to ignore people: Delay your response to incoming messages. Rather have a focus time for that. It will allow you to be more thoughtful in your response and reduce the back and forth of emails.
  • Stack – Schedule your meetings back-to-back in your calendar: First thing before you start your workweek, re-arrange events to maximize your (and your team’s) productivity. Try to create more meeting zones so that you have larger chunks of time to dedicate real work focus time.
  • Schedule – Block off Focus Time on your calendar: Once you have the blocks in place, you and your team can look at the week’s goals. Place the focus blocks in your calendars’ and stick to them. Protect your focus time.

To add to this, make sure your focus time is at your peak performance times. If you are sharper in the morning, make sure your plan pushes more focus time here.

5) Declutter your space

I don’t know about you, but I work better when my workspace is clean. Sometimes I find myself cleaning up my space before getting to the focus time. Everyone’s circumstances and preferences are different, so you need to figure this out. For example, if you work at home and it’s too busy to focus, think about going out for periods of time. Have a look at this blog post on how to declutter your brain.

Rescue Time

Rescue Time is an Automatic time-tracking and distraction blocking tool you can run on your PC all day long. RescueTime shows you exactly how long you spend on apps and sites down to the minute.

Find out more and use the free version. Upgrade to premium for 14 days free.

RescueTime

Features

  • See exactly where your time goes.
  • “Turn off” distractions like social media and news.
  • Stay focused on goals all day long.
  • Keep track of time spent in meetings and calls with one-click.

Summing it up

Focus time can help you and your team achieve your goals. With more time dedicated to the right tasks, you should see more quality work. Your team will also feel less stress and learn skills to manage time more effectively.

So now that you know what focus time is, it’s up to you to find the time.

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