How to find work-life balance and stop suffering

What do I call balance?

Here is our zero point of the route. Before I make a plan to bring balance back into my life, it's important to decide how I see it. What do I call balance? What am I missing? What do I lose if this balance is not there? Write down your thoughts on this.

By analyzing the answers, you can make your motivation more explicit, analyze the requirements for yourself, check them for realism and achievability, and see clear, predictable changes in the future.

The more specific our distant goal, the easier it is to draw up a plan of action to achieve it.

If you still don't know where to start, try Paul Meyer's Balance Wheel. Detailed and understandable instructions for its implementation are described by Roman Dosov here.

But what if the situation requires involvement in everything at once? And how can you plan at all when there is such a mess and continuous fires around? I can't reduce the time to solve them, I just don't have it!

To bring to balance means to reduce?

Yes, if you work 23 hours out of 24 hours and sleep for an hour. Only a straitjacket will help here.

But I believe that you have a few hours that you devote to yourself. The issue is more about how you manage them. If, after scrolling through the news feed for several hours, you find yourself feeling guilty, anxious, accompanying your lesson all the way, this is worth paying attention to.

After all, balance does not always require putting an emphasis on reducing something. Let's look at the situation from this point.

What do I need to add to my life? Maybe I can do it in parallel with my usual business? Or maybe I have separate time for this, but I don’t notice it, I fill it with a filler that I can’t remember at the end of the day? Or maybe this “something” is more like emotions or rules, rather than a specific action?

Total: you can reduce, or you can add, replace, parallelize.

And if I still can’t reduce the time for work and it’s not enough for other areas?

Don't shorten your work time. Leave everything as it is. Don't talk about your workload, don't negotiate deadlines, don't set a business time limit. correspondence, do not discuss further actions if you were forced to take an emergency job or help in a crisis moment. It will sort itself out on its own. Someone will definitely notice that you are suffering.

And if you do without shock therapy, then really, do not reduce working hours. Just put it back in the box. Show the rationale for why you should work 10 or 12 hours a day. Or not sleep at night. Or reply to a message the second it arrives.

If your area of ​​responsibility has expanded, acquired additional tasks, then you can always revise these tasks, combine something, correct something, ask for help somewhere, and delegate something or refuse it at all.

If your load is predictably growing, then you need to prepare a site for its increase:

• introduce fixed slots;
• abolish old non-working irrelevant schemes and processes;
• change the format, duration and number of meetings.

Is it possible to come to a balance quickly, once and for all?

Imagine the image of a tightrope walker. The movements of the rope and the air force him to bend over, the muscles to group, and the brain to analyze changes around and in the body. Some processes are a little more visible, and some are hidden. He is dynamic.

Can balance be achieved once and for all? No. Here lies the cause of shattered hopes, lowered hands and anxiety about the future, where nothing can be corrected. Balance is not an end point, a fixed state, or the product of your successful decisions.

The world around is dynamic, changeable. Every new day is different, even if you sometimes think so. Balance is not a permanent state. This movement is in one direction, then in the other direction. But you already have more than one scenario of how to return to it.

Take care of yourself!