How to strike a balance between your job and your personal projects - Margaret Buj - Interview Coach

How to strike a balance between your job and your personal projects - Margaret Buj - Interview Coach A healthy balance between your home life and work life can often seem difficult to strike; however, it can actually be surprisingly straightforward once you approach it in the right way. If you tend to overlook personal projects until a serious illness or other problem in the family forces you to take time off work, you should rethink your strategy. Here are details of how you can move forward. Is there something wrong with your scale? Picture the scene: you are in a job and work hard in it for lengthy hours each workday. However, despite often feeling like you are working from morning until night, you dont feel like your efforts are really reflected in your pay packet. Worse, because you are constantly working in the attempt to keep making ends meet, you have little time to spend on projects outside work. Those projects could include going on trips with your family, writing that novel which you hope will become a bestseller, getting your fitness regime into gear with time at your local leisure centres swimming pool and so on. Yes, there are many different things that you could enjoyably occupy yourself with in your personal life if only you had the time for them all. Does all of this seem familiar? Then you are likely suffering from a work/life balance that has been tipped too far towards the work side. Believe it or not, however, you can tip it back again. A choice, not necessarily a requirement You might be convinced that spending so much time working is a situation that you simply cant escape at least for now, and in any practical sense. You may consider it simply a price that you have to pay to thrive in your work endeavours. In other words, you might think that you dont really have a choice in the matter; you have to continue like this whether you like it or not. However, your attitude could change dramatically if a personal crisis suddenly hit. Such a crisis could be someone dying in the family, or a heart attack in someone you deeply love, like a spouse. All of a sudden, you could see the great need for a careful balance between life and work. Harvard Business Review points out that, while such a need tends to be ignored until an emergency arrives, that kind of disregard is a choice, and not a wise one. The site notes: Since when do smart executives assume that everything will work out just fine? Should this approach be nonsensical at work, it will be nonsensical during personal pursuits, too. How to redress a faulty work/life balance It could surprise you how much you can bring your personal life into your work life without compromising the quality or enjoyment of either. In words published by The Huffington Post, Interhealth brand manager Jawon Smith has advised that you could check your phone less regularly. You could then spend the freed-up time undertaking more preparation for work. If one of your personal projects happens to be trying to lose weight, you can make good progress with that on the job. Smith acknowledges that, while people often expect simple and quick results from their weight-shifting efforts, there remains no magic pill for realising this possibility. Your overall lifestyle will heavily influence how well you manage your weight. Perhaps, rather than always parking your car right next to the building where you work, you could place the vehicle at the end of the street. This would require you to walk more between your car and the workplace both before and after working hours. Even if you dont currently have a job, you could if a UK resident sign up to CV-Library. This jobs site can match you to promising vacancies while you spend time away from the computer to exercise, such as at the pool.