#Important of work life balance how to#

We need to act rather than react to situations and problems. Our feeling about our own individual work-life balance contributes to this stress in ways that it is hard to measure. So it goes without saying that reducing stress is important to our well-being and to our productivity. In addition to this an estimated 40% of job turnover is due to stress.Īn estimated $960 per year is spent by the average American worker on stress reduction. How costly is workplace stress? It is estimated that American companies spend more than $300 billion a year in health costs, absenteeism and poor performance. We spend a lot of time and energy working on reducing our stress. Each of us has an idea of what work-life balance means to us and splitting our time 50/50 between work and our personal activities does not always mean that we have work-life balance. Let’s take this new understanding with us throughout this blog.Īs you can see, in order to create a balanced life, we must understand what we want from our life and what stage of life we are in. It should clearly demonstrate to us that it is unreasonable to believe that we can spend the EXACT same amount of time on each of these areas of our life. This exercise should put our thinking about work-life balance in perspective. That leaves only 8 hours per day to focus on relationships, family, outside interests and hobbies. An average workday is 8 hours so out of the 16 hours, we work 8 hours. Now let’s assume that you have at least a 30 minute commute each way to work. That leaves us 17 hours of awake time in our day. Using 24 hours in a day, because that’s all ANY of us have, most people sleep an average of 7 hours per night. We are going to look at it honestly, realistically and with clear eyes and mind. We want to break this down in a way that makes it easier for you to think about work-life balance differently. This seems like it should be reasonable to do and yet in reality it is unrealistic. In fact, when you look up the definition, we learn “work-life balance is the state of equilibrium where a personal equally prioritizes the demands of one’s career and the demands of one’s personal life.” ( Business News Daily) Many people think that having balance means that there is an equal amount of time spent at work and at non-work activities. Time outside of work may include managing relationships, family responsibilities and other outside interests and hobbies. Defining work-life balance involves looking at how working people manage time spent at and outside of work. What is work-life balance? Let’s try to define it so that we are all on the same page.

#Important of work life balance how to#

We are going to explore how to have a healthy and honest view of work-life balance as we see it.

Once we get clarity about what is important, it is easier to think clearly about work-life balance. It is important that you are clear about what is important to you and that you are taking congruent action to support these things. It is also a matter of perception and what we believe about how much time we should spend on work vs non-work activities. Do you often feel that you have no work-life balance? Or that your life seems out of control? When our priorities or focus get out of kilter, then we will often feel like our lives are out of our control.