These days, hectic working hours have made it difficult for the working class to maintain a work-life balance. Making calls, sending mails and all other job activities occupy most of their time which leaves them with less ‘me’ time.
In this fast-paced world, are we giving priority to only one of our life roles over the other? Are we neglecting our roles in personal lives due to full-time engagement with our professional roles? Not only for the working class, but in each and every stage of our lives, as a student or as a worker, we need to maintain a balance between our different life roles for a peaceful living.
Research has shown that failure to achieve life balance leads to higher stress, absenteeism and lower productivity at work. Finding time for the people you love and spending time doing what makes you happy adds on to your productivity at work.
Life imbalance can be due to different reasons. One of the reasons can be full-time accessibility to work due to mobile phones. With phones, we carry our work everywhere we go. A single notification from our office makes us feel at work, no matter where we are!
Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon, prefers the word ‘harmony’ over ‘balance’ while talking about work-life harmony since ‘balance’ implies strict trade-off. He believes that quality is more important than quantity and prioritising your well-being is very important.
There are different ways to create a balance in our lives, while fulfilling our different roles in the best possible manner Firstly, don’t shy away from taking some personal time off. Secondly, get some real sleep. Thirdly, spend time with friends and family. Finally, exercise and being active is always a good option.
Other ways of striking a balance in our lives is by drawing a clear boundary between personal and professional lives is a good way too. We may have a to-do list with 50 tasks on it, we could prioritize those tasks and divide them according to their urgency and importance; and then work accordingly. Even going on a holiday is a great way to rejuvenate our minds and refresh ourselves, thus breaking the monotony of regular work. Fixing work hours and trying to stick to it is a great way to avoid mixing work life and personal life.
Balance is not restricted to working class alone. As students, we strive to maintain equilibrium between our academics and co-curricular activities. Being a part of different societies at college, along with studying our respective courses is quite a demanding task. Being able to handle work from both these sides, helps us learn to manage time efficiently and prioritise between various tasks at hand. Taking out time to exercise and pursuing our own passion is also essential while multi-tasking.
There is a popular saying – “Never say Yes, when you want to say No”. Many a times, we face situations where we already have our plate full with the current workload but we are faced with many other opportunities to take in. In such cases, it may be better to say ‘No’ and focus on the tasks at hand. This may help in maintaining the good-quality work rather than performing many tasks in a mediocre way.
All in all, we can see how different life roles can complement and be at a tug-of-war with each other at the same time. Therefore, it's critical to exercise our choice in prioritizing between different tasks. We may have hectic and tight schedules all day, however, when we plan ahead and prioritise according to our own well-being and health, mental and physical, we tend to harmonise and balance our life easily and efficiently.