How to balance your career and family
Is trying to balance your work and family life making you feel overwhelmed? We are here to help! From eating dinner with your family to implementing a bedtime routine, there are plenty of things that you can do to spend more time with your family without neglecting your career. Read our blog post to get inspiration on how to achieve an optimum work-life balance.
Take time to relax
If you’re feeling stressed when you arrive home from work, take a few minutes to relax. Whether you take a quick shower or go for a short walk around the block before you spend time with your children, taking a few moments to destress makes a big difference to the atmosphere in your home. If you don’t have a minute to spare when you enter your house, try to set up a routine on your drive home, which will help get you into a better mood. Play your favourite songs, listen to an audiobook or put on relaxing meditation on your drive home. That way when you enter your house, you’ll be ready to give your family your full attention.
Make time for yourself
While you’re trying to juggle family life with your career, you may end up neglecting yourself entirely. If you’re feeling drained, your performance at work will suffer and so will your home life. In the hustle and bustle of your daily routine, make sure that you set some time aside to recharge. Watch your favourite movie, read a book, turn on your favourite sport on TV or go for a run, anything that makes you feel better.
Eat dinner together
Put your worries about work aside and sit down to dinner with your family in the evenings. Time spent sharing a meal at the dinner table is a great opportunity to bond with your children and to hear more about their day. Sharing an age-appropriate story about your day can help to teach your children useful lessons and it allows them to gain insight into your career. When you share stories from your day, it encourages your family to share too.
Create a bedtime routine
Take the stress out of bedtime by establishing a routine. Not only will a routine make bedtime less troublesome, it will also allow you to spend quality time with your children before they go to sleep. Reading the kids a bedtime story is a great way to spend time together and it will also help with their education.
Ask for help
When it comes to achieving a work-life balance, you’ll need all the help that you can get. Establishing a supportive network with people you trust is important. Calling a good friend to vent after a stressful week can go a long way towards helping you de-stress so that you can relax on the weekend. Get your children involved in age-appropriate chores, such as helping with cleaning. Setting time aside to complete household chores as a family is a great opportunity to spend time together while keeping your home clean. If you have a big deadline looming, you could let the kids spend quality time with their grandparents so that you can focus on your work without any distractions. This strategy may even allow you to get your work done faster so that you have more time to spend together as a family without having to stress about work that you haven’t managed to finish.
Better time management
Managing your workload at the office is key to achieving a work-life balance. You’ll need to develop good time-management capabilities and learn how to prioritise effectively. If you’re managing a team of staff, make sure that you’re delegating tasks appropriately and not taking on all of the responsibilities of the project. As much as possible, try to complete your work at the office so that you don’t have to take it home with you.
Now that you know more about how to achieve a work-life balance, you can try implementing some of the strategies that we’ve discussed. Not only will balance benefit your family, it can help you progress in your career too.
I am 40 years young unemployed and living back with my folks
Hi Dale,
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