Balance your Work/Life? HOW?!

Often when I get home from work, I’m still checking emails and returning candidate phone calls. I, like most other people, struggle with maintaining a balance between my work life and home life. I have a hard time putting the phone down and walking away! I feel that I’m lucky to have a job that I love and the ability to impact people’s lives so I want to be accessible at all times. While my family and friends understand the day to day demands of my job, they still miss the quality time we used to have together.  So, by attempting to follow 5 different tips I’ve been able to begin maintaining that balance we all need. This is what I have learned and tried to make from it:

1. What’s important to you on a daily basis? Obviously work, but besides that, it’s important to me that I spend time with my family and make it to the gym! Those are the things I’ve struggled with time and time again. So I’ve had to make adjustments. Now I wake up a little earlier so I can go to the gym in the mornings and make sure that I at least put my phone on silent when I’m eating dinner with my fiancé or our families. It sounds so simple, but it has had a great impact on my daily life.
2. Drop unnecessary activities. For me, it’s TV! I get so caught up in “One Tree Hill” and “90210” that my Monday and Tuesday evenings have been hijacked! I forget to go and live life because I’m so wrapped up in these crazy shows. My solution to that has been to use DVR. This takes off the pressure of being home Monday and Tuesday evenings by 8pm in order to watch my shows. Now, I just record them all and whenever I have time to sit down and watch them, I can.
3. Protect your private time. I haven’t figured this one out yet. Truth! I feel that whenever I have some free time, I need to be spending it with friends that I don’t get to see very often.  Hopefully you’ll have better luck!
4. Accept help to balance your life. Often times, people ask to help us with certain tasks at work or at home. I struggle with this EVERY DAY. I feel that I’m being weak if I allow others to help me. By reminding myself what I do to help others I’ve been able to allow them to help me too.
5. Plan fun and relaxation time. This one’s actually fun! I’ve recently tried to plan fun activities for the weekends so that when the week days get long and the time I spend with my loved ones decreases, we are looking forward to knowing that we’ll connect in just a few days. This process also helps relieve the weekday stress of having too much to do because you know you’ll be spending time with loved ones soon.

See ya next month!

Kelly Abercrombie