Juggling Work and Life | Strategies for Work-Life Balance and Sustainable Success

We live in a fast-paced world where work and personal demands add up, making us feel exhausted all the time. Juggling work and life isn’t easy, especially if you don’t have a plan, which is why it’s so important to have strategies for work-life balance and sustainable success. 

Why is work-life balance so hard? 

In our modern lives, things seem to move faster and faster. Between work, family, friends and the activities that we want to enjoy, we can feel like we don’t have time for anything, making work-life balance feel like it’s a myth that can’t be achieved. 

In the way that most people see work-life balance, it is a myth. The problem is that many of us think about work-life balance as a pie sliced into equal pieces. This is not a realistic vision. There will be times when your personal life will require more of your attention, taking a bigger piece of your pie, and there will be other situations where work must take the priority.

If you are operating under the premise that everything must get an equal portion of your time, work-life balance will be nearly impossible to achieve.

If you see it instead, as something that fluctuates, with some of your priorities getting a much larger portion of your pie sometimes, and smaller portions at other times, you will see that in the bigger picture, you can achieve better work-life balance, as you adjust to the priorities at hand. 

The key though, is making sure you don’t stay in a state where one priority continually gets a bigger slice of your time, when you don’t wish it to be that way. 

Why is it important to have work-life balance?

Burnout is a real issue we face today. This is one reason it is so important to find a way to create work-life balance. Additionally, the stress and guilt we feel can eat away at the pleasure and joy we might feel in any moment, no matter what we are doing. 

Often, people feel like they should be doing work when they are spending time with family and vice versa. Those feelings of guilt, erode our sense of wellbeing, which will have a detrimental effect on our mental and physical health over time.

This is why it’s so important to develop a personal strategy for work-life balance. 

What strategies are effective for work-life balance?

It’s important to know that when it comes to work-life balance, that one size does not fit all. There will be people who love to work, others who need more time doing personal activities, and some who need to dedicate longer stretches to the people in their lives to feel successful and fulfilled. 

You must know what is important to you, and how much of your time needs to be dedicated to each area of your life to feel happy. This is why you must start building your work-life balance strategy with your personal values. 

If you do not know what you value and why, you will have a very difficult time pinpointing the reason you feel off balance between your life and work, which is a key part of building your strategy. 

You also need to be very clear about your personal vision for success. 

Again here, each one of us will see things differently. To feel truly successful, you must know what your vision is for your future. That vision is yours and yours alone. If you spend your time working toward someone else’s vision of your future, be it parents, children, a spouse or friend, you will not feel successful and you will continue to feel like your life is out of balance. 

It is only when you determine your personal priorities, that you can come up with your work-life balance strategy.

Based on your values and your personal vision for success, you can then decide how much time you’d like to dedicate to each sector of your work and life, remembering that it’s unlikely that each will be equal, and that the portion of time you have to dedicate might have to fluctuate depending on the circumstances for the day, week, month or quarter.

Once you make your strategy, it’s important that you stick to it as much as possible. Some people may want more of your time than you wish to give. You do not have to give in to their desires. No is a complete sentence, and one we all have to get better at using if we want to feel balance in our lives. 

After you get your strategy into place, it’s then a matter of checking in with it regularly.

• Has anything changed?
• Are you on track with your values and your vision?
• What needs to be adjusted?

Once you evaluate, you can reset and then refire, making juggling work and life easier. It is only when each of us determines our personal strategies for work-life balance that we can achieve sustainable success. 

After reading this, there will be people who feel they need to reinvent their success. If you feel this is you, I invite you to explore my Refire Online Course. It will help you define a new vision for your success, energize your passion and blast through the barriers that are holding you back. CLICK HERE to learn more now.