How to Build a Positive Work/Life Balance

This week, I answer a question about work/life balance and how to bring balance into your life when you feel you have too much work to do every day.

 

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Script

Episode 135

Hello and welcome to episode 135 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.

Do you ever feel you have far too much work to do and that you spend all your waking moments doing or thinking about your work? You are not alone. Many many people feel the same way, yet no matter what industry you work in and no matter how busy you feel you are, it is possible to bring a little balance into your life and have a better perspective on your work and your life. 

So let’s get straight into the question this week and that means it’s time for me to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.

This week’s question comes from Daniel. Daniel asks: Hi Carl, do you have any advice on achieving a good work/life balance. This is something I am really struggling with. 

Hi Daniel, thank you for your question.

Firstly, I do need to be honest with you here. I don’t believe in attaining a work/life balance. To me, this is a misnomer that can cause a lot of unnecessary stress. 

You see when we become focused on achieving a work/life balance it puts a demand on us to stop doing something at a certain time because if we don’t we won’t have balance. So, for example, if I am working on developing a slide deck and I am ‘in the zone’, and I look up and see that it is 5:50 pm, now I feel pressured to stop working on the slide deck at 6 pm because if I don’t I won’t have any balance. 

But what if you are enjoying being in the zone? I know I often am when I am working on a slide deck. I love that creative process and building ways to explain a point. For me, and many other people I have worked with, having a time pressure such as stopping work at a fixed time each day is not only impractical, it just adds additional stress you do not need. 

Then there are cases where you have a deadline coming up and whatever it is you need to finish you cannot miss that deadline. In these situations, the added pressure of making sure you finish working at fixed times do not help your flow or your ability to finish your work on time. 

Part of this problem is when we think of creating a work/life balance, we think in definitive times. For example, we think of a work-life balance of 8 hours sleep, 8 hours work and 8 hours play. Yet, life is not like that. It never has been. Sure, it would be nice to be able to consistently get eight hours sleep every night, to get all our work done in eight hours each day and to have eight hours to spend with our friends and family, but life is not like that at all. 

We don’t always get those eight hours of sleep. We can easily allow ourselves to spend just a little too much time watching YouTube videos at night. Sometimes, the work we do needs a little extra time in the day—we may have got a few more emails than usual to reply to or a piece of work we are working on needs an extra hour or so to finish. That’s more like the reality we live in. 

Now, there are jobs that help to make working fixed hours each day easier. In factories where we work on an assembly line in shifts. We begin our shift at 7 AM and finish when our colleague comes on shift at 3 PM. Or if you are a firefighter, nurse or call centre worker. These jobs generally have fixed hours. Yet, even with these jobs, particularly in the healthcare profession, once your shift is over, you often have training to attend and self-study to do. 

So we do have to be careful about what we wish for. Trying to build a consistent work/life balance often leads to additional stress you do not need.

Instead, I find building your work/life on a weekly basis works far better and reduces a lot of the pressure we add by trying to stick to a daily work/life balance. 

What I mean by building a weekly work/life balance is you first decide what is important to you. For example, if spending two or three hours every evening playing with you kids in something you feel is important to you, then you can schedule that time each day in your calendar. I know, for example, that despite Gary Vaynerchuk’s work ethic, which is impressive, he makes sure that whenever he is home in New York, he is home each evening and has dinner with his family. We don’t see that in his videos, but each evening he will go home and have dinner with his family. Once his kids are in bed, he may have a meeting or two late on, but he still makes sure the time he spends with his family is fixed. 

Likewise, for me exercise is important and I make sure that at 2 PM, I stop whatever I am doing and spend an hour exercising. I might go out for a run, got to the gym or do some home exercises. That time is fixed in my calendar every day. For me, exercising at 2 PM gives me a nice break in the day and gives me a mental boost to be able to do a strong session of work in the evening. 

Establishing what is important to you and what you want to do each day is a crucial first step to building a week of balance in your life. 

To do that, either use pen and paper or your notes app and write out what you would like to be able to do every week. How much time do you want to spend with your friends and family? How much time do you want to spend on recreation? Etc. Write whatever you want to do each week down. 

Then, open up your calendar and block time out each week to do these activities. 

When I lived in the UK, in the summer, every Friday night was blocked out for going to watch the Leeds Rhinos play. If they were not playing at home and their game was not featured on TV, I had a free evening. 

Saturday nights were Top Banana night at the Town and Country night club where my friends and I would start at the local pub, the Fox and Hounds, and once we were all gathered we would head out to the city centre and dance the night away. We would finish the evening with a curry at the Rajput in Headingley. 

Those we great times and I have a lot of fond memories of those days. These were fixed events. I knew where I was going and what I was doing and it made my life so much simpler. 

Now, what happens if you have an important project to finish? If you have been realistic about how you spend your time each day, there should not be any difficulty in finding the time to finish the project. 

Imagine if you decided to redecorate your living room one weekend. You would block the weekend out your calendar and focus solely on completing that project. If you planned ahead and scheduled the redecorating, then when that weekend arrived everyone in your circle would know what you planned to do and so you would not be inundated with requests for your time. The trick is the make sure all the relevant people know what you wanted to do that weekend. 

The same applies to your work projects. Often as we approach the deadline we realise we are going to need more time to finish the project. In these situations, if you have flexibility built-in, spending a couple of extra hours each day to complete the project would not be an issue. You would still have time to do the things you want to do but may have to reduce the time you spent doing those activities in order to free up a little extra time to complete the project. Instead of spending an hour in the gym, you reduce it to thirty minutes for a week. 

In these situations, your body would probably thank you for giving it a little extra rest time, but you still get your exercise in and you get to complete your project. 

When you plan your week ahead, you get to see what needs your attention, you can build in the extra time needed to complete those activities while at the same time you are aware of your obligations to your friends and family. No week need be the same, you can build in the flexibility to get your work done and spend time on your leisure activities.

What I have found is not planning the week ahead, often leaves us at the mercy of events. Now while I accept there will always be unplanned for emergencies and obligations, if we plan the week ahead we make better decisions about where to spend our time and although it is unlikely your plan for the week will not have to change throughout the week—that’s where the daily planning session comes in—on the whole, the work you planned to do will get done. 

This is why in the Time Sector System, once you have established what your recurring areas of focus are—the things you identify are important to you—you can build a week that allows you to fit your work around those things that you want to do and enjoy doing. 

We all have a bad habit of overestimating what we can do in a day and underestimating what we can do in a week. If you write 500 words of an important report every day for five days, you have a 2,500-word report at the end of the week. Thirty minutes every day instead of two and a half hours on Friday afternoon when you are tired out and are just looking forward to the weekend. Which is better? 

By planning the week, you can better distribute your workload and give yourself a better balance to your day and your week. 

Another advantage of planning your week is you will find you reduce the sense of urgency that causes a lot of our stress. Knowing you have time in the week to finish your projects and obligations will give you a sense of calm and you will be able to manage the unknowns that will inevitably crop up through the week. 

So, Daniel, if you establish some routines where you spend time doing the things you want to do, plan out your week so you get better at managing your time and not try and balance your days but instead balance your week, you will have a greater sense of calm, get a lot of work done and feel much more accomplished at the end of the week. 

Thank you for your question and thank you to all of you for listening. Don’t forget, if you have a question you would like answering on this podcast, you can email me at carl@carlpullein.com or DM me on Facebook or Twitter. All the details are in the show notes.

It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.