Achieve a balance between work home and family
For some of us, work seems to overlap with our home life, if we aren't taking work along home to finish later, we are thinking about work well into the evening hours. Our home life suffers, our family time suffers and we are neglecting the most important parts and people in our lives.
When we are at work, our thoughts are of home; our families, things to be done and places to be, come into our thoughts. When we are at home, we are thinking about projects to be completed at work, problems in the workplace and other work related problems and solutions. It seems like a never-ending circle of events.
Somehow, we let the urgent things (daily work habits) overtake our lives and it leaves very little time and energy for the important things in life, such as our family and home life. Stress becomes another factor in our lives, causing medical difficulties, short tempers, and lifestyle disarray. Our entire world becomes a shambles and we have totally lost control.
We all know that there should be a perfect balance in which we can dedicate ourselves one hundred percent to the task at hand, but how do we achieve this perfect balance?
To make it easy to understand, our first step is to decide what is most important in our lives. With most of us, that important thing is family and for those of us that are career minded, the important thing becomes a career and our version of success in that field.
If you think that spending time with your family is the most important, make sure that you schedule that time on a daily basis just as if you were scheduling a meeting, vacation or an appointment. During that time, work does not enter into it, work problems are off limits and your focus is keeping your family top priority.
If you feel that your career is your number one focus and priority, then you use your 'home time' to increase your knowledge of the business, make a list of new contacts, go over ways of increasing your value to the business and find ways to make it work smoothly. I am hoping that if this is your area of focus, that you don't have a family that you are overlooking and slighting.
Other things may come up in your life that want to change your plans, but it will wait for a matter of a few hours or possibly for a few days. Put it on your schedule of things to do, but don't let it interfere with your lifestyle at that particular moment. It is up to you to have and keep control of your life, to stop things from disrupting your life and to take its turn of important things in your life.
If you really think about it, do you want to be known for the person that worked themselves twenty-four-seven? Do you want to be known for the person that made themselves sick by taking on the world all at once? Do you want to be known for the person that had priorities in life and had control over their lifestyle?
Balancing work, home and family is easy, if you choose your priorities and have the assertiveness to just say 'no' to interference.
A meeting will go on with out you being there, an organization will not fall apart because you did not attend, the lawn will only grow another inch if you wait until the end of the week to cut the grass. However, the world won't come to an end because you have chosen to take control of your time and life.
Jan Hayner is a Professional Organizer that believes in Working Smarter-Not Harder and taking the stress out of life by following easy steps and guidelines. Read more at her website Easy Home Organizing and subscribing to her free newsletter Happy Organizers. Get more tips, hints and shortcuts to organizing and cleaning problems and her free pamphlets at her website.