If you have a demanding job, it can be easy to feel as though all of your time is taken up by work-related tasks. In order to maintain a healthy mind and lifestyle, it’s important to draw a line between working and living that works for you, but that’s something that is easier said than done for most people. In this articles, you can find 5 tips that can help you to improve your work-life balance, and start getting more enjoyment out of life.
1. Set Personal Goals
For most people, their jobs involve deadlines, targets and goals that are set by managers. As a result of this, we often neglect to create personal goals for our own lives. If you want to start creating a better balance between your work and your life, you should try setting your own goals that aren’t related to your job. This can be anything, small or large. Maybe you want to get fit, learn to play a new instrument, or dream of starting your own business one day. Whatever it is, outlining it and making a plan can help you to find more purpose in your life outside of work, and help you to look forward to your downtime more.
2. Make Time for Social
Activities
For most people, your working day involves a lot of socializing and working with others, but often, office politics aren’t sufficient to keep us living happy and healthy lifestyles. It’s important to put emphasis on making social connections outside of the workplace. Whether it’s spending time with family or joining a new class, it will help you to switch off from work and socialize in an environment that isn’t linked with your colleagues. That’s not to say you shouldn’t socialize with work friends, but it can be extremely beneficial to have specified time in which you socialize without the pressures of work hanging over your head.
3. Make Use of Downtime
When you have a busy schedule, it’s easy to feel like to are in an endless work.eat.sleep.repeat cycle, but this just means you aren’t taking advantage of the time that you do have outside of work. There are 24 hours in a day and most people will work for around 9 hours and sleep for 9 too. That leaves 6 hours that you can use to pursue the things that you want to do. Make use of your commute and start reading that book you’ve been thinking about. Make plans with friends after work for a few hours, or go jogging before you get to work. The possibilities are endless, and the time is available if you’re willing to be creative with your scheduling.
4. Make the Most of Your Vacation
Days
No matter how demanding your job is, everybody is entitled to vacation days. If you really want to establish a good work-life balance, then it’s essential to get the most out of your vacation days.
If you have weekends off, you can use your vacation days to create more long weekends, by booking the Monday and Friday off too. That means you only use two of your vacation days, but you could go on a trip or spend time with family for a full four days. As well as this, vacation days go by in a flash, so make sure you use them to their full advantage.
Vacation days aren’t just about getting away from work, they are also about living. Book a few weeks off and do something you’ve always dreamed of. Maybe you want to hang out on a beach somewhere or go on a ski trip.
No more short weekends on the slopes, pick up an epic pass and experience some of the world’s most awesome destinations like Niseko or Hakuba. Every vacation day is a new opportunity to squeeze more out of life and it’s important to remember that.
5. Gain More ‘You’ Time by
Becoming More Efficient
One of the reasons we can feel like we have no time outside of work is because we are spending our non working hours doing tasks we don’t enjoy. Efficiency is a trait that is useful both in and out of work and you can use it to make your work life balance better.
Try doing things like switching to online grocery shopping or buying meal kits, as this can help you to free up more time that you can spend doing things you actually want to do.