I was intrigued by this post on the Your Life Coach blog about having the wrong work life balance. It made me ask myself whether my own work life balance was wrong and then I asked myself ‘how can you tell when your work life balance is wrong?’
So I came up with a list of questions you could ask yourself to check whether your work-life balance is well.. er balanced!
- Do you sometimes feel you are not in control of your life?
- Do you feel you waste so much time commuting or traveling to work?
- Do you sometimes work late in the evenings or at weekends?
- Do you bring work home with you?
- Do you wish you had more leisure time?
- Have you ever had to cancel a social arrangement in order to do work?
- Do you feel you are only sticking at your job for the money?
- Do you find your leisure time is spent with work colleagues rather than your family or friends?
- Do you find yourself losing sleep through worrying about work problems?
- Do you wish you could do more work?
Looking at these questions, there may be times when you could answer yes to any of them. If, though, you answered yes to, say, 5 (or more) of them, would that suggest an imbalance in your work life balance?
Thinking about my life in the past, I reckon I would have answered yes to 6 or 7 of them. I’d take that as an indication that my work life balance was unbalanced. That is not surprising for I was thinking about my time as a teacher and certainly the demands that were being made upon me then out of teaching hours meant that things like leisure time was almost unheard of and weekends, too, would be lost to work.
As for my life now, since leaving teaching, I feel I could still answer yes to 2 or 3 of the questions. That may well be an indication that my work-life balance is better balanced now, However, there are times when I would answer yes to question 10 ‘I wish I could do more work’. This is at times when work opportunities and contracts are thin on the ground. Consequently, money is tighter and that puts pressure on other areas of life, including leisure time. You see, why it is called a work life BALANCE. You need work to provide financial income and security but you need that work not to take up precious time and opportunities for other areas of your life.
Of course, these 10 questions are only ones I have thought of to measure my work life balance. There may be other questions you could think of to measure your own work life balance. What is important here is that each of us can try to measure our work life balance rather than just accepting the status quo or simply complaining about some ‘gut’ feeling that the balance isn’t quite right.
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It doesn’t really matter what you call it; downshifting, down-sizing or just simplifying your life. Making your life less complicated and, therefore, more enjoyable seems to be very much in vogue once more. I daresay the current economic crisis may well have something to do with the resurge in popularity of the concept.
Today I noticed a post on the Your Life Coach blog which gave ten reasons why people consider downshifting their life. It seems a very comprehensive article and I could certainly relate to two or three of the reasons given there.
If you have ever thought about simplifying your life then now could well be a good time to do it. The ebenefits to be gained could be tremendous, not just to your bank balance but also to your quality of life. That is one theink that really strikes you about the article; the reasons why people choose to down size their lives are not all financial ones. Many of the reasons lie in their quality of life and a desire to do something more worthwhile.
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