It’s Monday morning and you are at your desk with a piping hot cup of coffee with your planner in front of you – trying to figure out the week’s schedule, planning activities in a way that helps you take some time out for yourself. Two days in the week and whatever you had planned has gone out the window and before you know it, you find yourself furiously typing away at your desk into the wee hours of Saturday!
While 80% of us believe that a job that offers work-life balance is an important consideration when we take it up, not many of us are able to achieve this. The elusory ‘work-life balance’, at most times feels like a dream, especially for devoted employees. The do more with less culture has made it onerous for people to manage professional and family life.
When compared to other countries such as the UK, China and even the USA, India has the longest working hours – 52 hours in a week to be precise. This further pushes us to take the onus and manage our time well, so that we can take some time out to follow our hobbies.
Do you know what’s missing here? An integral part that we forget almost all the time – Prioritizing.
Karen Quintos, Executive Vice President and Chief Customer Office, Dell says that prioritization has helped her achieve work-life balance more comfortably despite her demanding career.
Let’s take a leaf out from her stance and see how prioritization might help us achieve work-life balance by considering the following.
- Prioritising can help you space your work
Unplanned work has the uncanny ability to catch us off-guard. To make things worse, it upsets our mood and puts us in a headspace that makes us uncomfortable. While most of us cannot put off these tasks, day-to-day prioritising can help us space our work properly. When you prioritize the tasks for a specific day – you set your own achievable goals.
- Prioritising can help manage your time more efficiently
Most of us feel that we are working for more than our share and yet not rewarded for the same. This is where prioritisation comes into picture, seniors need to delegate tasks according to the priority. Also, every individual should aim for time based targets, this will not only bring you in the good books but also enhance your efficiency.
- Set your own standards between what is too much work and what is not
There are some things we look forward to and others we detest, this judgement may also be the impediment for completing tasks. Prioritizing can help us identify what are the things that we like doing and are good at, therefore will require less efforts, when compared to those that we are not as keen about.
- Prioritising gives you a sense of accomplishment
How many times have you felt drained out by the end of the day feeling what a waste of a day? Here’s a tip – prioritising enables us to list tasks and allot a time period to them, as and when you complete a task you get that sense of accomplishment motivating you to work better. A small tick for each work done acts as a confidence booster.
Work-life balance is not about how much time you allot to your work and how time you allot to your life. It is about the quality with which you live your life and do your work!