Put Your Idle Time to Good Use for Work-Life Balance Improvements
Put Your Idle Time to Good Use for Work-Life Balance Improvements
For many people, it’s not a matter of lacking enough time in the day to get things done in both their personal and professional lives. It’s more an issue of not knowing how to use their free time in the best way possible.
You might find yourself working eight hours a day and having eight more hours of personal time that you could use to better your life. But what you do instead of bettering everything is sit down and binge watch eight hours’ worth of a Netflix series.
Or, you get lost on a social networking site and spend your time arguing with strangers for no apparent reason. It’s okay to have some downtime where you veg out and do whatever you feel like doing.
But if you have ample spare time, then you might want to use it to bring more improvements to both your personal and professional lives. For example, think about how your eight hours of work unfolds each day.
While you might be devoted to sitting at your desk and working on projects for eight hours, how do you feel physically and emotionally during that time? You might be stressed or drained, lethargic and uninspired.
If you have additional time in your day, work on bettering your work life for whatever issue you’re facing. If you find yourself tired and achy from sitting at your desk all day, make sure you work some exercise into your daily schedule.
This will help with any physical recovery that you need at the end of each day. If you feel emotionally stressed while at work, then you might spend some of your spare time learning stress reduction techniques.
For example, you could learn and practice deep breathing techniques that you can then apply throughout your day at any moment. You can spend some time engaging in guided visualization.
You could learn meditation so that you can start or end each day with the stress relieving technique. You could also integrate other forms of stress relief during your off hours, such as taking a soak in an Epsom salt bath that uses aromatherapy to calm your nerves.
If you feel like your career has been uninspiring lately, then maybe you can spend some of your idle time immersed in fun, educational opportunities. You can read books or take online courses that reignite a spark of creativity in you that has been stifled for a long time. Use your extra moments of downtime to better all areas of your work and personal life.