Work-Life Balance: Fact or Fiction?
With life as we know it being changed dramatically this past year and having our homes be our workplace as well as our sanctuary away from work, it’s no wonder that at times we can feel strained from being pulled too many directions.
Working in an office regularly might soon be a thing of the past with everyone being able to use technology to communicate and companies realizing that a lot of us prefer to work remotely anyway (this lady right here!) and they can benefit from not having such a large corporate office.
So the old adage of “leave work at work” is near impossible when that workplace is in your dining room. There’s no physical, visual and often audio separation from where you work to your home. Even if you are one of the fortune ones to have a dedicated room for an office, you probably find yourself often taking breaks in other areas of your home, going to the bathroom, stopping by the fridge, petting the dog, checking in on the kids to see if they’re studying and not playing Minecraft….
Point is, there really isn’t a separation from work and life anymore. But, unlike that old adage telling you to "leave work at work," I’m here to tell you that it’s impossible.
But wait! Before you say, “Well this sounds depressing; I’m going to stop reading this article...” I’m going to tell you what others typically do not: it’s okay that you can’t separate work and life. In fact, by trying to separate them, you’re probably doing more harm than good for yourself.
But (and this is a big but), if you feel like work is overrunning your life and it’s impeding on your happiness, let’s chat more about that and how you can achieve a work-life balance that suits you.
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SEARCHING FOR WORK-LIFE BALANCE
If you’ve ever searched for work-life balance on the interwebs, next to all the photos of scales balancing triangles with work and life written on them, Mr. Google might have given you some confusing results.
For instance, Business News Daily says, “Work-life balance is the state of equilibrium where a person equally prioritizes the demands of one's career and the demands of one's personal life.” But then go to the next suggestion to find the steps to achieve this “equilibrium,” you get Time.com suggesting that “Everything is not equally important. Do fewer things and do them well.”