Work Life Balance
South Tyneside Mental Health Service User Voice Service has put together a leaflets with tips for improving your work-life balance.
A healthy work life balance reduces stress, prevents burnout, and promotes well-being. Work life balance is about being content in all areas of our life regardless of how much time we spend on each. This is because we are all at different stages of our lives and have different needs and priorities.
Organise And Prioritise Your Time
A useful way of prioritising our time is by using the Eisenhower Matrix. By dividing tasks into categories based on their level of importance and urgency, we can focus on doing tasks, which matter to us. Important tasks are prioritised whilst unimportant tasks are either delegated or not completed.
Click here to download the leaflet to complete this task of organising and prioritising your time, listing the tasks you need to complete into each of the quadrants.
Assess What Is Important To You
We naturally strive to live in harmony with our values. When we do things that match our values, we feel happy and satisfied. When we do things which do not align with our values, we feel unhappy and unfulfilled. Getting clear on our top values can help us to make important decisions about the way we live our life and prioritise our time.
Here are some suggestions for identifying our core values:
- Think about the people you admire. What qualities do they possess? What is it about them that inspires you? What behaviours in them do you admire? Write these down.
- Think of situations that made you feel strong about something. What was happening? What was it about the situations that brought up such strong feelings inside you? Write down the values that were being suppressed.
- Write down what is important to you. What must you have in your life to feel content and experience fulfilment? Can you identify any values in what you have written?
- Think back to a time in your life when you were the happiest. Who was around? What were you doing? Write down what values were driving these feelings.
By completing this exercise, you now have a list of your personal values. If there are any values that are similar, group them together. For each group of values come up with a value that best describes them collectively. Make a list of all the collective values and rank them in order of importance.
Pick the top three to five values on your list. Refer to them when you are faced with a big or difficult decision. Ask yourself: how do the options I have align with my values? Which decision is the best fit for my values?
You can also use your values to guide you in how you live your life. Ask yourself: Do I live in alignment with my values? If not, what can I do to change this?
Set Boundaries
Technology has not only made our lives easier, but it has also created expectation for being reachable at any time of the day. To avoid thinking about work when you are not at work, switch off your work phone when your finish work and put your laptop away. If you are on annual leave, set an out of office notifications on your email to let people know when they should expect a response from you.
Learn To Say No
It can be hard to say no to people, especially if you are used to saying yes to please others. Many of us find it hard to say no for fear of rejection or confrontation, making the other person angry or not knowing how they might react. However, if we say yes to things we do not want to do, this has an impact on our time and well-being.
Saying no is a skill that you can develop. Practice saying no out loud. The more you say no, the more natural it will feel.
If you are approached for help it can be beneficial to ask the person to email you the request or respond by saying you need to check your diary and you will get back to them. Doing either of these things enables you to think about whether you want to agree to it and if not, to think of a suitable response to decline.
Prioritise Your Health
It is important to look after our health. When our lives get busy, we often skip meals, sleep less, and do not take time out to unwind. This is however counterproductive as we end up being less productive and risk heading for a burnout.
Plan your diary so that you have time for exercise, for eating healthy food and for sleeping. Do not skip lunch breaks. Plan fun activities and make sure to take annual leave so you can switch off from work completely.
Download The Leaflet
Click here to download the full leaflet from Mental Health Matters.
