How to Build a Positive Work/Life Balance

This week, I answer a question about work/life balance and how to bring balance into your life when you feel you have too much work to do every day.   Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System Carl Pullein Learning Centre The Time Sector Course Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page   Script Episode 135 Hello and welcome to episode 135 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show. Do you ever feel you have far too much work to do and that you spend all your waking moments doing or thinking about your work? You are not alone. Many many people feel the same way, yet no matter what industry you work in and no matter how busy you feel you are, it is possible to bring a little balance into your life and have a better perspective on your work and your life.  So let’s get straight into the question this week and that means it’s time for me to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Daniel. Daniel asks: Hi Carl, do you have any advice on achieving a good work/life balance. This is something I am really struggling with.  Hi Daniel, thank you for your question. Firstly, I do need to be honest with you here. I don’t believe in attaining a work/life balance. To me, this is a misnomer that can cause a lot of unnecessary stress.  You see when we become focused on achieving a work/life balance it puts a demand on us to stop doing something at a certain time because if we don’t we won’t have balance. So, for example, if I am working on developing a slide deck and I am ‘in the zone’, and I look up and see that it is 5:50 pm, now I feel pressured to stop working on the slide deck at 6 pm because if I don’t I won’t have any balance.  But what if you are enjoying being in the zone? I know I often am when I am working on a slide deck. I love that creative process and building ways to explain a point. For me, and many other people I have worked with, having a time pressure such as stopping work at a fixed time each day is not only impractical, it just adds additional stress you do not need.  Then there are cases where you have a deadline coming up and whatever it is you need to finish you cannot miss that deadline. In these situations, the added pressure of making sure you finish working at fixed times do not help your flow or your ability to finish your work on time.  Part of this problem is when we think of creating a work/life balance, we think in definitive times. For example, we think of a work-life balance of 8 hours sleep, 8 hours work and 8 hours play. Yet, life is not like that. It never has been. Sure, it would be nice to be able to consistently get eight hours sleep every night, to get all our work done in eight hours each day and to have eight hours to spend with our friends and family, but life is not like that at all.  We don’t always get those eight hours of sleep. We can easily allow ourselves to spend just a little too much time watching YouTube videos at night. Sometimes, the work we do needs a little extra time in the day—we may have got a few more emails than usual to reply to or a piece of work we are working on needs an extra hour or so to finish. That’s more like the reality we live in.  Now, there are jobs that help to make working fixed hours each day easier. In factories where we work on an assembly line in shifts. We begin our shift at 7 AM and finish when our colleague comes on shift at 3 PM. Or if you are a firefighter, nurse or call centre worker. These jobs generally have fixed hours. Yet, even with these jobs, particularly in the healthcare profession, once your shift is over, you often have training to attend and self-study to do.  So we do have to be careful about wha