Work-life balance
How to know when you've messed up?
TL;DR
Work-life balance is necessary, but how do you judge if you’re in balance or out of balance?
Define your priorities
Work on them
Re-evaluate/pivot
Every single one of us has heard this word before. It’s get thrown around in whatever career you are pursuing. If you’re lucky, you are in a place where this is actually valued and sought after and if you’re unlucky…well I won’t rub it in.
Everyone wants this balance but its hard to judge whether you have a good work-life balance or not because we’re just so engrossed in the day-to-day that we don’t really give this much thought and when we do, it’s usually too late.
There’s 24 hours in a day, let’s assume you sleep for 8 and work for 8 as well. That leaves only 8 hours for everything else in your life, be it family, friends, hobbies etc. Seems like its well balanced, right? But what happens when your work hours start creeping up? Do you sacrifice your sleep, your hobbies or your time with family & friends? This is where the “balance“ part comes in. You need to be able to balance your work in such a way that your life isn’t affected drastically.
This is easy if your work hours are strictly defined, if you will definitely end your day after 8 hours (or whatever number of hours) of work. It gets tough when this is not defined. Maybe, you have a startup that requires extra time, a side-hustle that mean a lot to you or you just have to put in extra work in your regular 9-5 job.
So its sort of a no-brainer that you need a work-life balance, but how do you figure out if you are in balance or worse, out of balance.
So I’ve come up with something for this, it’s not exactly a framework, it’s more of a way of thinking really.
Write down 3 things in your life that you want to prioritise. Hypothetically, lets say for me these are:
Family
Money
Health
Think of them as equidistant dots on a graph. The time and effort between these are equally spread out. But when you start spending too much effort on one side, say you start working extra to earn more money, thats when the other two start getting affected. Likewise, you focus too much on health, the other two will definitely get affected. If one of your priorities starts affecting the other priorities that’s when you know that something’s not right and you need to Pivot. That’s when you re adjust either your priorities or the effort you put into each of them.
This is not exactly easy, but it is necessary if you want to maintain that work-life balance. So take a step back and define your priorities, work on them and then re-evaluate them periodically and I guarantee that you will consciously be maintaining a healthy work-life balance.