Question of the Day: What's the best way to balance your work and personal life?

[TopsyTurvy]

Balancing work and personal life can be tricky, but a few key practices can help you feel more in control and fulfilled in both areas:

1. **Set Boundaries**: Define clear work hours and stick to them. This helps prevent work from spilling over into your personal time.

2. **Prioritize Tasks**: Identify the most important tasks each day, both at work and in your personal life. Focus on completing high-priority items first.

3. **Schedule Personal Time**: Treat personal activities with the same importance as work meetings. This can include hobbies, exercise, or time with friends and family.

4. **Limit Digital Distractions**: Set limits on phone and email notifications outside work hours to avoid the temptation to “just check” work messages.

5. **Learn to Say No**: Take on commitments that align with your goals, and practice saying no to extra work that could stretch you too thin.

6. **Check In Regularly**: Periodically assess your balance. Are you feeling overwhelmed? Under-stimulated? Adjust your boundaries and schedules as needed to stay on track with both work and personal goals.

Balancing both areas takes some trial and error, but maintaining flexibility and clear priorities can help make both work and personal life more fulfilling.

 

[fla4fun]

Balancing work and personal life can be tricky, but a few key practices can help you feel more in control and fulfilled in both areas:

1. **Set Boundaries**: Define clear work hours and stick to them. This helps prevent work from spilling over into your personal time.

2. **Prioritize Tasks**: Identify the most important tasks each day, both at work and in your personal life. Focus on completing high-priority items first.

3. **Schedule Personal Time**: Treat personal activities with the same importance as work meetings. This can include hobbies, exercise, or time with friends and family.

4. **Limit Digital Distractions**: Set limits on phone and email notifications outside work hours to avoid the temptation to “just check” work messages.

5. **Learn to Say No**: Take on commitments that align with your goals, and practice saying no to extra work that could stretch you too thin.

6. **Check In Regularly**: Periodically assess your balance. Are you feeling overwhelmed? Under-stimulated? Adjust your boundaries and schedules as needed to stay on track with both work and personal goals.

Balancing both areas takes some trial and error, but maintaining flexibility and clear priorities can help make both work and personal life more fulfilling.

I agree with these. No one will look out for you, so you have to do it yourself. So long as you are firm but polite, people really won’t give you a hard time about it. If they do, that’s on them. There will be differences in how a lone adult might handle some of these vs an adult with who is a caregiver, but the basic ideas are the same. Pull your weight at work but don’t let someone else take advantage. Separate your work and family life as much as possible so you can focus on each individually. Take care of your mental and physical health. Take on new tasks at work or new hobbies at home to challenge yourself. Be willing to change when you can so others will be understanding when you can’t. It’s all about balance.

 

[Allison]

Are you copying and pasting all these posts from somewhere?

 

[tvguy]

4. **Limit Digital Distractions**: Set limits on phone and email notifications outside work hours to avoid the temptation to “just check” work messages.

Depends on the job and the individual. While not a stated job requirement, from a practical standpoint, and to preserve my sanity, I had to check work messages several times a day during my off hours. We had our big morning meeting 15 minutes after the start of my shift, and I NEEDED to have been through all messages for that meeting.
One job requirement DURING working hours was that you respond to all internal e-mails/texts/phone messages within 10 minutes. Just a reality of my job.

 

[TopsyTurvy]

Are you copying and pasting all these posts from somewhere?

No.

 

[robinb]

Welcome to the DIS!

I think it’s a little weird that your “Questions of the Day” are not questions at all, but you do you boo.

 

[barkley]

1. **Set Boundaries**: Define clear work hours and stick to them. This helps prevent work from spilling over into your personal time.

yeah, well that does not work for all jobs. when I worked for DSHS my co-workers who lived local to our office/service area could not define boundaries with clients who believed they were entitled to 24/7 access. they would chase them down in grocery store aisles, catch site of them driving around town and start following them, approach them at movie theaters/their kid's school activities and events...

there was a reason many of us opted to commute long distances so that we could physically separate our personal from our professional lives.

 

[tvguy]

yeah, well that does not work for all jobs. when I worked for DSHS my co-workers who lived local to our office/service area could not define boundaries with clients who believed they were entitled to 24/7 access. they would chase them down in grocery store aisles, catch site of them driving around town and start following them, approach them at movie theaters/their kid's school activities and events...

there was a reason many of us opted to commute long distances so that we could physically separate our personal from our professional lives.

True, not for all jobs. I still get people asking me for help with something and I've been retired over three years. I have to explain I no longer have access to a lot of information I used to.

 

[Anthony1971]

Love the ideas. As one grows in a career and IF higher titles are accepted it is just not possible to set boundaries or one has to much to handle solving X issues. Higher responsibility requires solving problems within in a company at odd times on occasion especially when many companies are the back end to a service aspect and or have multi state (time differences) and or international. In the end one is paid for this.
I will add think what is most important in life as accepting X title or X career will mean accepting being available nights and weekends sometimes a lot sometimes less plus travel always consider pay VS your time as X more dollars can mean a lot more of your time.

 

[Foxhound3857]

Always have something to enjoy in your off time. For me it's chess (right now just videos but I am going to open a chess.com account soon) and gaming. Mix in a little cannabis when I know I have an off day coming up.

Have something to look forward to when you get home. Let that be your motivation to put in a good days work, knowing there's a reward waiting for you when the day is done.

 

[_19disnA]

Where you work, what level of job you have, what the expectations are of your boss or the company tends to be the things that matter regarding this topic. This reads more like something you see on 'linkedin' where some self-proclaimed business consultants are constantly flinging out one-size-fits-all advice on any number of topics.

 

[tvguy]

Where you work, what level of job you have, what the expectations are of your boss or the company tends to be the things that matter regarding this topic. This reads more like something you see on 'linkedin' where some self-proclaimed business consultants are constantly flinging out one-size-fits-all advice on any number of topics.

This reminds me of when companies added "Human Resources" Departments about 25 years ago. Their expertise was in traditional office operations, Monday through Friday, 9 to 5 work day. There was a learning curve for the HR Department as to what is normal in the Broadcast industry. Odd hours, split shifts, double shifts, holidays being normal work days, unscheduled overtime, missed meal breaks. First HR Director "investigated" an employee complaint that their 3 am to 7 am schedule, and having to work holidays was unreasonable. From the HR Director's training, that COULD be unreasonable. But in Broadcasting that is absolutely normal. The work that needed to be done was for the 5 am newscast, including pre-show prep. The show ended at 7 am so a later shift would be impossible.

 

[_19disnA]

I think in many companies they simply renamed the 'Personnel Department' to 'Human Resource Management' since it sounded more sophisticated. Much like the Accounting Dept is now called Finance, but they all still do the same things they used to do .....................LOL.

 

[PollyannaMom]

Balance is the key to life!

I guess a big part for us was trying to keep the total work hours between us reasonable. - DH pretty much always worked full time, but depending on where we were financially, DS's age, etc., I've worked full time, part time, or been a SAHM. It gave us a little more flexibility to move things around and rebalance household chores as necessary so we could both have some free time as well.

 

[tvguy]

I think in many companies they simply renamed the 'Personnel Department' to 'Human Resource Management' since it sounded more sophisticated. Much like the Accounting Dept is now called Finance, but they all still do the same things they used to do .....................LOL.

It was a new, stand alone position at my last two employers. Of course, when the economy went south, it was the first position eliminated. Really doesn't exist anymore. My last employer has one person as the HR person for four locations in 3 states. But most HR functions are handled by outside contractors online.