Women – we can try to balance our career and family lives, but it can be difficult to excel at both at once when we have our children’s upbringing to be worried about.
This is why it’s crucial for us to plan ahead and work towards a sustainable income early on while maintaining a good lifestyle. Here’s what you can do to balance your work life and your personal life.
Plan for your Retirement
It doesn’t matter if you have just started working at 23 years-old or if you have just started looking for a job as a fresh graduate. You need to get your superannuation organised early to reap the benefits when you retire.
As an example of the current situation for women and superannuation, Australian women retire with only $104,734 on average compared to their male counterparts’ $197,054, partly due to the amount of unpaid leaves women tend to take more to care for their children and other family members.
You’re going to need to build up a more aggressive superannuation portfolio to retire comfortably with the hard-earned income from your younger years!!
Freelancing
Have an hour or two to spare after your office hours?
Take up freelance gigs to earn you a side income! Some freelance jobs and services can help you earn you better working rates when you work outside typical office hours, and your freelance gig might not even need to be skill-based!
As an example, being an Uber driver can already earn you better rates when you drive at late-night hours. Remember to take up freelance projects that can earn you more as you go.
Apply the 80/20 Rule
The Pareto principle, otherwise known as the 80/20 rule, explains that 80% of your results are produced form 20% of your effort. To maximise your earning potentials, you need to replace the 20% of your work results that required 80% of your efforts.
Don’t be afraid to drop off side gigs or even your full-time job that is no longer as profitable when you have found a better opportunity.
Additionally, try to avoid clients that are too demanding and take up a disproportionate amount of your available working time.
Upgrade Your Skills
One of the greatest assets that you can have is your skills. You can try challenging yourself to read up on a new topic that can enhance your knowledge during the first and last 30 minutes of your day.
When you are equipped with better skills, you can appeal for a job promotion or a raise.
If you are doing freelance jobs, you can charge your clients based on your skills’ worth by utilising value-based pricing.
Let your customers know why you are worth that higher price for the job that they are requesting and prove it to them with your results.
Reorganising Your Schedule for Better Efficacy
How are you utilising your 24 hours daily? Write down all the tasks and activities that you typically do and rank them based on how much income you are getting from the tasks and how impactful they are towards advancing your business.
Focus on tasks with the highest priorities first, and don’t let yourself be distracted or controlled by other agendas including e-mails and phone calls until you have completed those vital tasks.
If you are working on repetitive tasks – including creating paid content for your own blog, you can create these content in batches of one week or one month’s worth in advance so that you can focus on other tasks later on.