Are you devoted to your job? Is it one of the more meaningful aspects of your life? Or is the work you do for money just a means to an end, a way to keep a roof over your head and food on the table while you pursue your true passion or spend time with people you love? Whichever one of these things is true, you need to be mindful of work/life balance, even if you love your job and feel like you’d do it for free. The suggestions below can help you achieve that balance.
Dangers of a Lack of Balance
If you’re already feeling burned out, you don’t need anyone telling you about what will happen if there isn’t enough work life balance in your life, but there are other hazards before things reach this stage. Taking time away can help refresh you and allow you to work more effectively. In addition, with no balance, you can find yourself too strongly identified with the work that you do and lost without it to anchor you. It’s important to find other things to give your life meaning as well so that when you retire someday or leave your job for another reason, you have something else to focus on.
Consider Career Changing
If you are someone who is unhappy in their job, you may want to consider changing it for something that gives you more control over when and how to work. One option might be becoming a real estate agent, a licensed professional who helps buyers and sellers with real estate transaction. You can learn how to get into real estate and more about why this might be a desirable field, including the ability to set your own schedule and grow your income exponentially. The varied clients and properties you’ll work with can also keep you engaged since no two days are ever alike.
Identify What Matters
One of the keys to an effective work/life balance is identifying what matters to you and what doesn’t. Make a list of things that you have in your life and things that you wish you had or wish you had more of. Make a list of things you spend your time on. Compare the two lists. It’s likely that you will be surprised at the proportions and how little time you spend on the things you care about the most. It’s not always possible to rebalance this list as much as you might like, but you should make an effort to reduce the things that aren’t important to you as much as you can and increase the things that make you happiest.
An Abundant Mindset
It can be easy to make your own world very small by saying things such as “I’ll never be able to achieve that kind of balance myself even if other people have” or “I’m so busy and if I don’t do all these important things, who will?” Cultivating an attitude of abundance, looking at time as something that you collaborate with rather than as an enemy that is stealing away all your chances of actually enjoying yourself or doing things that you wish you could do, is important here. No one is going to give you permission to seize some of that abundance, so you have to learn to give it to yourself.
Once you begin to work on your abundance mindset, you may find that even on the days you think of as the busiest, there is more time than you have realized. Cutting out things that don’t serve you, like spending too much time on social media, a commute, or a friendship that makes you unhappy can help you find small chunks or large swathes of time in which to do the things that matter. However, you should also be wary of trying to fill every minute in every day. When you cut out activities that you’ve identified as time wasters, make sure that some of the spare time you’ve created is left unstructured.