Due to the rapid industrialization and globalization, boundaries between work and home are blurring thereby increasing the demand for work and higher productivity. Therefore it is need of the hour to maintain a healthy working atmosphere and a balance between work and life so as to ensure harmony of personal and organizational objectives. A good work-life balance means you create synergy among various facets of life, where benefits gained from each area can enhance and strengthen the others. Work-life Balance is an emerging and new concept, where many people are aiming to integrate their work and personal lives successfully.
Here are some useful tips to help you achieve a realistic balance:
- Set Yourself Free.Do what you love. There are many aspects of living a healthy life. Engage yourself in such activities which rejuvenate you and makes you feel lively and active. Do introspection and identify the activities that make you feel delighted and bring out the inner child out from you.
- Schedule your Work.Follow a routine and fix time for every activity. Allot specific time slot for various productive activities to avoid minimum wastage of time and reap maximum benefits out of it.
- Reduce family time stress.The quality time with your beloved ones should be stress free and happiest. It doesn’t mean you need to plan expensive and luxurious family trips, rather there are many ways to spend blissful, memorable moments with your family, loved ones and friends. Few ideas include going for a bike ride, sharing an interesting craft project, baking or cooking a meal, going for a hike in a local park, or taking a car ride.
- Be Tender.If you start a new habit that soon gets pushed to the side in the onrush of regular life, understand that it’s completely normal. You haven’t failed; you’re just experiencing the same breakthrough bumps everyone else goes through. It’s not realistic to decide to take up a positive new practice and follow through on it forever. Ask yourself if the new habit is worth practicing, and if it is, get it back into your schedule. If it isn’t satisfying, try something different that will re-energize you.
- Aim at Sustainability. If it’s not already a part of your routine life, creating an expectation that you’ll practice silence, or meditation, or journaling, or some other activity every day just isn’t realistic. Once or twice a week, or even once or twice each month, may be enough for some balance activities, at least to start with. After all, any effort is better than none.
- Love what you do.Don’t get caught up in trendy balance activities if they don’t fit your tastes. Since cultivating our best selves is one of the reasons we seek balance, spend time doing the things you really love to do. These are, after all, the pursuits that will seriously rejuvenate you and make you feel grateful.
So if the pursuit of balance is putting you off balance, remember that while it’s a valuable pursuit (in moderation), its purpose is to minimize your stress, not add to it. Keep in mind that on any given day, something probably has to be sacrificed. Just ensure that you have kept aside time for those activities that you have procrastinated today.
Written by- – CS Nidhi Baglikar (Asst. Prof., Biyani Girls College)