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Achieving the right balance between work and life is challenging in the modern world.
It’s something most men have to deal with on a daily basis, particularly as they take on more responsibilities and commitments. It can feel overwhelming having to manage the work and life balance.
Carl Yorke wrote a great article here on The Good Men Project, titled ‘How Fathers Worry About Work Life Balance Too.’ In the article he quotes Professor Kristen Shockley who says that there is little difference between men and women when it comes to work-family conflict.
Being a fulltime firefighter, running my business and spending time with family can be tricky but I’ve learned some very important tips along the way to make sure that my work life balance is harmonious.
Here are 3 tips you can use to find the right work-life balance.
1. Protect your time like it’s worth more than GOLD (because it is)
It’s not always so obvious but it makes the biggest difference.
Each of us only have 24 hours in the day and 168 hours in the week. Much like any resource (including money), we need to be wise with our time and treat it with the respect that it deserves.
Prep Scholar created a very useful chart for their article which documents all time measurements from seconds all the way up to centuries.
(Photo is courtesy of Prepscholar.com ©2019)
One of the best ways I have managed the balance between being a firefighter, dad, a business owner, husband, friend and community member is by protecting my time and prioritising what is important to me. I do this at work, in my business, with my family and with friends. I have identified what’s going on in my life and what’s required in each area to continue on a positive path. In doing this, you can begin avoiding anything that doesn’t fall into any of the priority categories.
Just evaluate what things in your life are the most important to you right now and start evaluating what things you benefit from devoting your time to and what things you’re better off leaving behind.
This doesn’t mean you have to be overly abrupt or rude with people though. Dorie Clark wrote about how you can do this the right way in her Harvard Business Review article ‘How to Protect Your Time Without Alienating Your Network.’
The more you can narrow your focus to what you will spend your time on, the more time you will have for things that are important to you. People around you will eventually understand how you operate and respect that.
2. Ditch low value activities and habitual interruptions for focus
We have slowly become accustomed to constant interruptions over the last decade. It is now considered “normal” not to be able to focus on a single task for more than a few minutes before your attention is diverted to some other unproductive task to the point where very little is being achieved during the work day.
Gloria Mark, who studies digital distraction at the University of California, Irvine says that it takes about 25 minutes to refocus after being interrupted.
Using a method of focus and distraction reduction will boost your productivity by such a significant amount, it will have a profound effect on your ability to get more work done. That way, you will have more time to spend on high value activities outside of work, like family trips and passion projects.
Fixwillpower identified 28 Low-Value activities that waste a lot of people’s time. Chief among them are activities like “checking your phone every time it vibrates, scrolling mindlessly through social media feeds.”
It took about 10 years from the launch of smart devices for people to start talking about the potential downsides of this new technology. Kommando Tech recently published an article which revealed that the average person spends 3 hours and 15 minutes on their phone each day.
If you can habitually reduce the ability to be interrupted this will help you balance your work and outside life by a significant margin in most people cases.
You can do a simple check of your phones screen time/pick-ups or take note of each time you are interrupted in a day to start getting a gauge on what sort of gains you could achieve.
3. Plan Early And Have Group Social Events
In our household, I’m the planner of the house.
Each year, we all sit down and decide what we want to do next year; big holidays, seeing old friends where we need to travel etc. These activities are placed in the calendar at the start of the year. It helps us with a lot of things, especially with getting good travel and accommodation preferences.
Apart from the big items everything each person in our house wants to do is put on the calendar for everyone to see, so that we don’t double book and have time to organise anything required. This helps for a number of reasons, including always having something to look forward to.
The other thing I do is organise social events in groups, so that we can see people who are really important in our lives. This requires only one logistical output for the catch up instead of a heap of individual catch ups.
Start Small
I hope you can take even 1 idea from here and implement it so that you too can improve your work-life balance.
These methods have allowed me to have more spontaneity and freedom than ever before. It feels refreshing to know when you have open free time and being certain of it is very relaxing for the little bit of work that’s required to get it.
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This post is republished on Medium.
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Photo: Shutterstock