There are several ways in which what happens in your daily life can have an effect on your working life. This is especially true if you’re working from home. The key to maintaining a good work-life balance is to ensure that neither sphere of your life adversely affects the other.
One example would be meal preparation. If you’re trying to eat healthily, you’ll want to prepare your own meals. This can be a hassle because you’ll need to go grocery shopping and also cook for yourself. So when will you do these chores? Before you start working? After? Or will you take a break midday to cook your meals? If you don’t wish to cook, you may choose to order food from outside. But what will you order? And are the meals healthy?
Just this one point alone has so many questions that need to be answered. Deciding what to eat can take up a lot of time and cause decision fatigue. You cannot be productive if you keep wondering about your meals. If you decide to cook midday, after all the prep and cleaning you may be too tired to be as productive. This overlap in work and home life needs to be figured out. Besides these, there are also chores that need to be done. When will you do the laundry and the dishes? Does the house need to be vacuumed? Anyone who does household chores will tell you that cumulatively, these chores are exhausting. So, it’s best to have a schedule that you follow. You may choose to vacuum your house every other day, and do laundry on Tuesdays and Fridays. There are no hard and fast rules here, but you need to have a system that works for you.
If you have kids, you may choose to delegate the smaller chores to them. That will lighten some of your workloads.
Other than these activities, you might have to fetch your kids to and from school. This too can mess with your schedule if you don’t factor it into consideration.
The truth of the matter is that if you’re working from home, your routine will face iteration several times before you have one that is fantastic and suits you well. Don’t expect perfection on the first try. Life is unpredictable and fluid. Your child may come down with the flu. Your car may break down when you need to make a trip to the mall and so on.
These little challenges can throw you off track. But that’s life… and one inconvenient setback in one area can have ripples on everything else in your daily routine. The best way to prevent unexpected setbacks or constant time-wasting issues will be to actively look for the areas that may overlap. You may not be able to predict them all, but you can definitely figure out where your home life impedes your work progress and vice versa.
From then on, it’s just a matter of finding ways to get around these little kinks until you have a smooth routine and you can work on autopilot without constantly scrambling to get things done.
“Unless structure follows strategy, inefficiency results.” – Alfred DuPont Chandler.
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