Do you ever get stuck thinking about all the mistakes you’ve made in the past? It’s really easy to replay past mistakes again and again in your mind. But, that was then, this is NOW!
Time management is the key for work and life balance.
When you’re evaluating your work life balance, it’s really easy to beat yourself up for having an imbalance between the two. I think that the reality is is that we really don’t have a balance between work and life. It’s all very convoluted now, and time spent working happens in your personal time as well as personal time happening at work. Decades ago schedules were very cut and dry and were easy to keep separated.
Instead of beating yourself up and evaluating what has happened in the past with both work and life getting mixed together, I’d like to recommend to you that you recognize what went wrong for you in the past and learn from it.
Here are a few questions to evaluate what went wrong with you are in balance between personal and work life:
- First, stop and think about what’s important to you at work?
- What is important to you in your personal life?
- Where do these two areas of importance intersect?
If you find yourself unable to separate your personal and your business life, then you may have some other issues going on that are not necessarily related to not knowing how to segment your work life from your business life from your personal life.
As a manager, it’s really important that you seek to find balance between your work and your personal life. It’s important for your employees or direct reports to see that you can leave work at work and leave your personal life at home.
Now I’m a firm believer that it’s impossible to always have these two completely separate. But the reality is that most of your time spent at work really can be spent doing work stuff. Likewise in your personal time, you really truly can have most of your personal time not have work interruptions. Ultimately, you have to take responsibility for your schedule and your time and make sure that you were not allowing the two to blend together.
If you’re not taking control of your schedule, that’s likely where the problem is coming from and shows up looking like you have no work and life balance. The reality is that if you are not managing your time well enough, you will find yourselves in a situation where your work and their personal life get blended together.
When you are looking back and reviewing how things are going in your work in your personal life, try not to get upset at yourself for what feels like an imbalance between work and personal life. Instead, look for ways to learn from what did not work for you in the past and try to do better going forward. Everyday is a new opportunity for you too try a little harder in managing the balance between your work and personal life.
That was then, how do you want your now to look?