keep it simple on plain white background.

Chasing the dream of a work life balance

 

Is there really such a thing called work-life balance?

What really is this work life balance anyway?

Work-life balance is the ability to experience a sense of control and to stay productive and competitive at work while maintaining a happy, healthy home life with sufficient leisure. It’s attaining focus and awareness, despite seemingly endless tasks and activities competing for your time and attention.

sign post with time family career health friends time work going in different directions.

Image courtesy of Forbes.com

 

How can this balance be achieved? According to work-lifebalance.com there are 6 components of work life balance.

  1. Self-Management
  2. Time Management
  3. Stress Management
  4. Change Management
  5. Technology Management
  6. Leisure Management

I must admit that It often feels that sometimes in an effort to create the work life balance I can find myself out of balance. If you’re probably saying that I’m not doing it right – just think about this, if most of us were doing it right with work life balance then there would no reason for Google to return “About 327,000,000 results (0.25 seconds)” when I Googled work life balance. Nor would there be a need for hundreds and thousands of books written and sold at Barnes & Noble or Amazon on the subject.

man on a tight rope

Photo courtesy of Behind Bricks

I’m learning that there just isn’t one strategy to address what’s popularly called work-life balance. The internet is not short on tips on and reasons why work life balance is important.  (Just in case you’re interested you can check out these tips from Huffington Post; The Muse and WebMd just to pick a few.

However, with all the how to’s tips and strategies you will quickly learn that what works one week may not work the next week. I believe the reason for this that there are factors beyond your control affect this delicate and often elusive balance.

If you’re like me, you’re either too much on one side of the scale trying to get to the middle. Work life balance attempts are exhausting. If often seems like I put a lot of effort to maintain a delicate balance only for something beyond my control tip it. I’m already exhausting looking through the Google results to find the right set of tips.

magnifying glass with the word solution

Image courtesy of ebta

So what’s the solution? It’s definitely not a one size fits all. However, I can say that the solution is simply this – keep it simple. Perhaps we should just focus on one thing at a time. Multitasking often times does not make us more efficient or balanced but rather increased levels of attention deficits and feeling more unbalanced.

keep it simple on plain white background.

A time and place for everything

So from now on I’m going to keep it simple – a time to work, a time to rest, time for family, a time for me, a time for friends and play. When is the time right for each? You know it, it’s a matter of whether you want to really do it. Multi-tasking and trying to do too much achieves the opposite. So when work is crazy, work; but you must take time off to spend time with the people who matter, do the things that you enjoy. Your inner guide is telling you – you just have to listen.

Kerry-Ann

Kerry-Ann Reid-Brown is Founder & host of Carry On Friends one of the first podcasts dedicated to the Caribbean American Experience. She is leading the way for Caribbean Podcast as the founder of Breadfruit Media, the first Caribbean podcast production company; and founder of the Caribbean Podcast Directory a place to discover podcasts by people of Caribbean Heritage.