Is work-life balance an end game? It’s rather a journey and a constant cycle!

It is a well-known fact now that work-life balance is an extremely important part of one’s professional and personal lives for a better quality of life. Despite that a major part of professionals around the world struggle with age-old assumptions of extended duration of working hours. They still are stuck in the mindset that to gain professional excellence and get successful working for a long duration is important and essential.  

Professionals panning across industries describe their jobs to be highly demanding, chaotic and exhausting, leaving them no time for personal lives. This leads to additional stress. 

Pandemic has provided people exposure to try out different strategies to strike a balance between professional and personal lives. But is this the final destination? An end game? Certainly not! Work-life balance is just a cycle that is to be included as a way of life, like a cycle – it doesn’t end and has to be kept treading on. This cycle has few steps which must each be included in the journey. 

Take a step back and de-normalize: Make a list of things that are holding you back and causing all the stress and dissatisfaction. And then scrape it off with a new design. 

Listen to your emotions: Make a rational list of emotions and priorities and drive your actions accordingly. 

Implement changes: Once priorities are set, it’s time to take action. That can also mean a ‘public’ change that might alter the expectations of the employer drastically. But these changes are essential for the long-term benefit of you professionally as well as personally. It can also be a more ‘private’ change in which you change your work pattern and professional time-table informally without necessarily changing the expectations of the employer. 

This cycle is a constant work of revaluation and improvement, with tweaks as and when required.