To strike the balance between home and work life, you need to have some clear boundaries. The entire process of boundary setting can be anxiety-provoking as we must use the dreaded ‘no’ word. If you are a person who does not like letting people down and likes to please them, this can be a particularly emotion-laden word to use. On the flip side, without ‘no’ in your arsenal, you are allowing other people’s needs, demands, and priorities to take precedent over your own. In special circumstances and for short periods this can be OK, and even necessary, but if it is your default then over time it will leave you feeling depleted and resentful that your own needs are being ignored.
The first place to start in setting boundaries is with your own intentions. If we set an intention to do something, we will do it. If we are going to ‘try’ to do something, we will continue ‘trying’ to do it. Think about how your work and life are going now. Where do things feel like they are going well and where do you feel they are out of control? This could be in a range of areas. Is evening work becoming the norm rather than the exception? Are you finding that weekends are spent checking and catching up on emails? Are you finding that you are spending excessive screen time on your phone even when you are supposedly at home relaxing? The issues will be different for each of us and so the boundaries we set will be unique to each of us, but some honest evaluation of how it is going now is a good starting point to define what will work for you.
Balancing work and life
One of the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic has been to shift mindsets towards the idea of flexible working as a way of life. Organisations that were fiercely resistant to working from home now realise that productivity can be maintained without chaining employees to an office desk in some remote corporate location. The rise in flexible working policies across many industries gives opportunities to strike a much more reasonable work/life balance. What it will require is some reflection in terms of what you feel is reasonable in terms of your working day and week. This includes ensuring that when you have finished your day, you ensure that not only your body but your mind, is freed up to enjoy personal time with family without the guilt of feeling that there is something else that you should be doing.
Logically we know we work to live and not the other way around, but work, its priorities, its demands, and its deadlines can suck us into an endless cycle of delivery that saps our time and energy even when we aren’t there. Our organisations are like hungry beasts constantly demanding to be fed and if we do not define our own boundaries around what is acceptable and what is not, then we will find ourselves sucked into a vortex of work that never ends.
You cannot ask the organisation to set the balance between home and work as it will always set the balance in its favour. You must decide what you will give, the hours you will work, and the no-work zones that are times when you are completely unavailable for work both mentally and physically so that you enjoy restful downtime with your family.