Remote work is here to stay in one form or another for some companies and teams around the world. Yet, despite the benefits that work from home has to offer, there are drawbacks too. And one of the most often cited challenges is the absence of a remote work-life balance.
Maintaining a healthy work-life balance can be difficult in today’s culture that celebrates being always on. In fact, 94 percent of 1,000 professionals surveyed by the Harvard Business Review said they put in 50 or more hours a week at work. What’s more, nearly half that group clocked in more than 65 hours a week.
In today’s always on workplace culture, where employees are rewarded and oftentimes expected to work long hours and communicate continuously, balance can be hard to find. In fact, more and more people are prioritizing work over their personal lives, tipping the scales toward burnout and stress.
Prioritizing your work life might not seem very easy, when everything you have to do feels important. Taking things as they come, without having a strategy, usually throws you into chaos, where you running a race against time day after day. Eventually, this continuous fight is likely to lead to burnout and dramatically affect your life.
Here are 7 “safety measures” that will hopefully help you fight the chaos and reclaim your productivity.
Write down the most important things in your life – those that you wouldn’t give up for anything, no matter what.
A simple way to do that is by designing a chart of the most important areas of your life:
Next, you should write down your top three priorities for each area.
Once you do that, make sure to invest 80% of your time and most of your efforts into accomplishing the items on your chart. The rest of the time should be allocated to completing other tasks that need to be done.
Simple and intuitive, your schedule should be focused around your non-negotiable core values.
The amount of time you assign to each of your tasks reflects your true priorities. Very often people dedicate more time to less important tasks, losing sight of what truly matters. Avoid taking on menial tasks and learn to delegate those assignments that don’t necessarily require your expertise.
One of the easiest strategies for efficient scheduling is the 1-3-5 method. This means that your daily schedule will feature one very important task; three tasks of medium importance; and five little things.
I have two kinds of problems: the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent. – Eisenhower
Eisenhower inspired productivity experts to create what is called The Eisenhower Matrix for prioritizing tasks. The matrix uses the urgency and importance values to make your work life easier, as shown below.
The Eisenhower Matrix
Reward teams and you get to build motivation, boosts productivity and develops team trust. Indeed, offering people recognition boosts their self-esteem, confidence and happiness at work.
Some other advantages are increased employee engagement, less staff turnover, higher customer satisfaction ratings and the fact that organization grows in its sense of purpose. To be sure, there are plenty other good reasons to reward teams. But only a few great ways to do it.
Work pressure is a subtle, yet very risky problem. It can start with a bit of stress. You might be feeling a bit over extended. Perhaps stretched too thin because of too many deadlines. Or maybe it’s been a lot since your last restful sleep.
We’ve already covered what work pressure is
Work pressure is a serious concern for your well-being. It can significantly impact your health and happiness.
So far, we’ve covered the many ways work pressure can affect you. How it plays a role in our lives, and how it’s tough to deal with it.
Work pressure is a huge issue in the lives of many people. Yet it often goes undetected. In fact, you might experience great levels of work pressure and not even realize it.
Previously, we covered some issues about how work pressure can affect work-life balance. It starts with a few more colds and some restless nights. Shortly, your personal life gets cluttered up. And you end up hoping for a sick day. With high cortisol levels, your perception skews. Especially when your work-life balance is off.
Work pressure is a constant in today’s workaholic culture. Indeed, formerly 40-hour workweeks have gone beyond 60. Not for all, naturally. But despite Sweden’s six-hours workday, most places still go for extra hours.
While there’s clear work pressure resulting from working 12 hours a day, this is not the only source. Numerous other stressors have an equally strong influence. Because everything is changing at a faster rate. You need to be swift and learn new things quickly and simultaneously.
Synergy can be of massive help if you know how to use it. For that, we want to share with you this infographic that summarizes 11 ways in which you can put yourself into hyper-productive mode by guarding your time, procrastinating wisely, working in groups, and others alike.
Image Credit: Veri Ivanova (Unsplash.com)