Awareness of a Work-Life Imbalance Is the Hardest Part
Awareness of a Work-Life Imbalance Is the Hardest Part
Regardless of what career you choose in life, chances are, you won’t even recognize that you are suffering from an imbalance between the time you devote to your career and the time you devote to your personal life.
Usually, what happens is someone will suffer an extreme reaction to being overly attentive to one area or the other. For example, they may get so far behind in work that they realize they’ve been slacking off and having too much down time.
This could cause them to miss a launch date or to not meet other work related obligations for their clients and customers. They may not even realize it until their income begins to decrease.
Or, it could go the other way. You could end up facing extreme personal life consequences caused from working yourself too hard. You might have a relationship that is on the brink of ending.
You could have a health situation resulting from long hours and a lack of self-care. Unfortunately, most people aren’t aware until something bad happens. A better way to improve your personal life and your success is to be aware of when there’s an imbalance in your life.
There is no one who is going to come to you and alert you to the fact that you are spending too much time on one part of your life. You may hear complaints from customers or loved ones, but even then, you may not connect the dots.
If you start to see signs that your career and personal life are battling for your time and energy, then you may want to take a step back and analyze it to see where the problem lies.
If you want to prevent issues ahead of time, which is the best way to run your life, then you will conduct a periodic check in to see how things are going before they spiral out of control.
Depending on how chaotic your work and home life tends to be, you may want to check in daily, once a week, or monthly. You may even want to check in with your friends and family to see if they feel like you’ve been stretched thin lately.
Of course, the opposite could be true, too. You may have people questioning whether you even work at all because they see you doing everything but work on a regular basis.
Becoming aware of this issue early on allows you to quickly and efficiently correct your behavior so that you are devoting the right amount of time and energy to both your career and your personal satisfaction.