The world is evolving faster into a ‘deeply concentrated ball of work, targets, and aims’. While we live in this modern society, the workday often blurs into our personal lives leaving no room for work-life balance.
We are checking emails while having dinner with family.
We are doing business calls while our kids played.
We are removing the office stress on family members and vice versa.
Isn’t it a sort of catastrophe to our personal life?
Well, work-life balance is often mistaken for having a great job. Instead, it is all about setting boundaries and the integration of wellness into one’s daily routine. To your surprise, technology can be used as a leverage to get good work-life balance, if used mindfully. Though it may not be the panacea to all our problems, but definitely be efficient if done with the right intent.
So, how is it that a person strikes the perfect work-life balance using technology as a medium? Let us take a look at 5 simple yet effective ways:
1. Improve Productivity
Having offices from all over the globe can cause a loss in productivity for the sheer difference in time. With the advancement in Cloud technology, it is now possible to be able to access all the required data from across the globe of a certain ‘accessible channel’ at one’s fingertips. This allows various information, documents, and communication to be an easy task from wherever you are. The other most important aspect is better collaboration in order to enhance productivity further.
2. Opt for ‘Remote’ Work
This is one of the best aspects of the flexibility that technology offers the modern world. While still staying within their comfort zone, a person can work from any place with only requirements of a Wifi and a laptop, which truly gives better results or outcomes.
This is a great advantage for people, who for some reason cannot be at the office ‘physically’ but still contribute to the growth of the company. This calls for better synchronization of the schedules and deadlines when people are working remotely. However, when implementing this concept, you need to be mindful of the boundaries, as once again you do not want your ‘boss’ to be everywhere you go and to know all that you are up to. And, of course, it is possible with these websites.
3. Go for Self-improvement
Various super-cool apps such as Mind Shift, available today allow an individual to be mindful of their mental and physical health. These apps are designed with software that allows the individual personalized instructions with respect to their mental and physical health. The app allows a person to basically schedule their life and work in such a manner that there are various intermittent breaks in between which will ensure you to have a ‘breather time’. Breaks could deal with your meals, your sleep requirements or your physical activity; all to be able to offer the right balance for better productivity in the end.
4. Hire a Tech Assistant
These are real life-savers in today’s time and age. A budget app such as Mint allows you to be able to manage your finances without worrying about going overboard. This indeed saves time, ‘lurking’ behind bills which you can further utilize to work efficiently and also to be able to offer some ‘me time’ with yourself or your family. Budget tools not only help you control your finances but also to get a better picture of your overall financial status and help graph future financial goals to align with one’s needs and aspirations.
5. Leverage Time-savers
These are real charmers since these tools assist by ‘deleting’ the digital clutter around that are meant to ensure that the employees work smart rather than to waste their time or work in a manner that is less efficient. Numerous ‘time saving’ apps work by helping the individual to focus on their task and not get distracted by the various ‘un-fruitful efforts which in turn reduce efficiency. In fact, it is not only a limited employee, but some tools such as Reservety are also helpful for employers too.
Conclusion
While above are the prime aspects, the way technology can aid strike a better work-life balance, there are tons of ‘tips’ and ‘tricks’ that will ensure you a better balance. However, with the ease and accessibility of technology and exposure to social media, people might get easily distracted. It is quite surprising as to how much time a person ‘wastes’ online. Be it browsing, watching videos, chatting over social media or also the news online making it one of the prime reasons for urban-stress.
Here, Employing apps that allow the user to ‘lock themselves’ out of a certain social media app altogether could definitely be the way to unplug. You might be able to control the temptations and thus, would be able to manage time more efficiently.
However, I believe technology in itself is neither good nor bad. It is in the hands of us, humans, to make the optimum use of it. Everything is dependent on us, because, in the end, we must ask ourselves ”how do we want to use technology?”