2:30 a.m. No time to sleep.
Some achievements bring only suffering.
Are you empowered? Ask first,
Whose is the power that is now loaned to you?
In spring, money seems everything.
In winter, a warm coat is better.
Haiku and all other thoughts and comments welcomed.
Technorati Tags: haiku, work/life balance, living well, setting priorities, personal values
Since the 1970s in the U.K. and the 1980s in the U.S., the phrase “work-life balance” has been used to shine a spotlight on presumably unhealthy behaviors of working men and women as it relates to the neglect of families, friends, personal time and the like in favor of work-related activities. Many studies of this issue have shown that women, in particular, are plagued by this seemingly inherent conflict, especially when children or families are involved. As someone who has been in the professional workforce for the entirety of the “work-life balance” debate, I must admit that I have never really agreed with the entire notion. In fact, I don’t even view it as a “work-life balance” but rather as a “life continuum”.
Focusing on the “balance” part of the work-life balance can keep us all feeling on edge. Maintaining a focus on outcomes allows leaders to manage the many competing priorities that form part of life’s continuum. Read the full story
This is part 3 of my short series of ideas and suggestions for taking some of the stress out of your life and bringing back a better sense of balance and enjoyment.
This is such a tough one. When the work/life balance gets tough, the tough end up reaching for the chocolate. With a bit more organisation however, it isn’t an impossible task to have healthier foods to eat.
Dietary reductions you can make to help your body cope with stress include reducing or eliminating your caffeine intake — including the caffeine found in sodas, cola, energy drinks and chocolate. Caffeine is a stimulant that can make your body as tense as it would be if under stress and elevate your heart rate and blood pressure. Over-indulging in alcohol will make you feel relaxed at the time, but eventually produce the opposite effect. It can also affect any medications you are taking. High fat and high sugar foods — typical in ‘comfort eating’ — contribute little to your body’s nutritional requirements, so it’s vital that you are aware of what you eat, how much you eat, and when you eat it. Read the full story
Photo credit: Littledan77
The traditional image of the sun-bronzed, ‘no worries’ Australian has become more of a myth than a reality in the past few years. Instead, our working hours have increased in line with jobs being vacated but not filled and employers expecting overtime as the norm instead of the exception. All of which is leaving us with less time for home — but still working harder to pay for it — and virtually no time or energy for meaningful relationships, family, friends or hobbies.
For most people, the main source of relaxation is to slump on the sofa with wine, chips and bad TV for dinner — only to wake up the next morning with the remote control imprinted on our faces. The day starts again when we leave for work in the dark. Sound familiar to any of you?
This gloomy way of living and working has been examined by Clive Hamilton, Director of the Australia Institute, who found that if the average Aussie worked the same hours as the average worker in other industrialized nations, we would be able to take the rest of the year off from the 20th of November. When you consider that the average number of hours worked per week also includes part-time work — with Australia having the second highest proportion of part time workers in the world — the picture looks even worse. Read the full story
We’ve published many articles on this blog about work/life balance, so it’s interesting to see a rather different idea being suggested by Joan Borysenko on The Huffington Post (”Busting The Balance Myth“).
Her main point is that balance isn’t always possible. There are too many things to be done. Maybe there is no way to organize your time so that everything stays ‘in balance’. Trying to do so may be chasing an unattainable idea and creating a problem that isn’t really there. Ms. Borysenko writes:
Juggling requires maintaining your center. The idea is to stop managing life so much, and begin managing yourself. Long ago I learned that it’s better to prepare the speaker than the speech, particularly when I’m well acquainted with the subject matter. If I meticulously outline a lecture, rehearsing the points as I get ready to begin, I’m likely to lose my center. But if I chat with the audience first, put myself at ease, or take a few minutes for some deep breathing, the talk always goes more smoothly.
Here comes part 2 of my short series of ideas and suggestions for taking some of the stress out of your life and bringing back a better sense of balance and enjoyment.
As your work load and responsibilities increase and your free time is filled with house work, childcare and chores, finding ‘me time’ can feel like an impossibility. You are interrupted all the time through reacting to the needs of others; your brain still buzzes with unfinished business that affects your sleep and you run the risk of exhaustion, which in turn repeats the cycle by increasing the output of stress hormones.
Your time out — maybe just half an hour per day — must be spent doing something you enjoy. My friend Jill likes to read a magazine; Dean likes to do a work-out; Kent goes for a bike ride; and Sonia weeds her yard by the coast.
‘Me’ time can also be . . . nothing. For me sometimes, it is a big chunk of quiet. It is not that I don’t enjoy my work and I love being with my family, but I recognise the need to unplug the mobile phone, keep the TV turned off and just go outside and sit in the garden. On the other ‘me side’ hand, I also love spending time with my friends doing something relatively simple like going out for a movie or coffee — anything that isn’t related to work or responsibilities or sensible ‘to do’ lists. Read the full story
Work/Life balance is more than a buzzword, it’s a way of life. The word ‘balance’ doesn’t necessarily mean an even divide between work and life; instead, ‘balance’ means successfully managing all the responsibilities you have in all areas of your life.
Despite all the technology and labour saving devices that we have, and our parents and grandparents lacked, we work longer hours and have more time poverty than any other era in history. We also struggling with ways to find ‘quality’ time for ourselves and our families among the never-ending chores: work demands, commuting, home, kids and social and community commitments.
The failure many experience in achieving any real work/life balance means that family life can suffer and so can your physical, emotional and mental health. The huge increases in illnesses such as chronic back ache, clinical depression, heart disease, blood pressure, type 2 diabetes and obesity, are all indicators that our current work/life balance is way out of whack. Read the full story
It’s easy to imagine that you are busy when all you are truthfully doing is attending to various social calls — especially when those activities can be indulged in without moving from your desk and computer. E-mails, instant messaging, and social web sites like Twitter all demand time and attention, and no other type of attention will do in our ‘instant world’ save the immediate kind.
For some time, I’ve made it my practice never to answer e-mails right away, unless they are so obviously urgent that nothing else will do. I’m not intending to be rude to those who contact me — quite the reverse — since my immediate response would have to be superficial and poorly considered. What I would have written right away and what I eventually write a day or so later are rarely even similar. The intervening period has allowed my mind time to take in what the other person wrote to me, mull it around, and produce something in return that is more worth reading.
Many writers on time management and productivity will urge you to check your e-mails and similar messages only at set times, rather than spending all day jumping to see what has arrived when the computer makes whatever noise signals a fresh e-mail. Few go the extra step and urge you not to reply until at least 24 hours have passed. But if refusing to break off whatever you are doing to read an e-mail when it arrives saves you from needless distraction, waiting a while to respond will often prevent you from writing what you may regret only a little while later. Read the full story
We live in a world of duality: love versus fear, right versus wrong, negative or positive, doing or being, and so on. Maybe that’s why one of the qualities of a ‘mature individual’ (not chronologically mature, but emotionally, psychologically and spiritually so) is the ability to hold and reflect upon both polarities at the same time, e.g., “light and dark” together. Many refer to this as enlightening state where you do not have to opt for one over the other, but can entertain both polarities, with curiosity and without judgment.
For many, at work in particular, living with duality results in stress and tension on a daily basis. Consider the tension people experience as they move back and forth on a continuum between under budget and over budget, team cooperation or team competition, bosses who are supportive and those who are bullies.
Stress and regret surface whenever we want to experience only one end of the continuum and reject the other as bad or wrong. People who live life from this “right versus wrong”, “good versus bad” mindset, make themselves face continuous pain and suffering. When we put all our attention on one end of any continuum of opposites (it doesn’t matter which end), our energy is out of balance. Accepting only one side of a duality and rejecting the other does not lead to wholeness. Read the full story
Peace with pointlessness — maybe the best way of dealing with pointlessness at work is not to worry too much about it. That’s the provocative message from an article by Lucy Kellaway of the The Financial Times and the BBC, based on a talk she gave on British radio (” The best way to find meaning at work? Don’t look for it”).
“It pays the mortgage and gets you up in the morning, but these days workers want more from a job — they want meaning. Just don’t go looking for it,” she begins. Why not? This is her answer: “. . . we are in the middle of an epidemic of meaninglessness at work. Bankers, lawyers, and senior managers are increasingly asking themselves what on earth their jobs mean, and finding it hard to come up with an answer.”
And if that sounds glum, try this:
“This doesn’t mean that ambition is a mistake; it is just that there is no magic to advancement per se. The status and the money go up, but that’s it. And then, beset by affluence and by introspection we start to demand that our work has a larger meaning. This almost always ends badly: meaning is a bit like happiness — the more you go out looking for it the less you find.”
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