Work Life Balance - Action Plan

Lets get down to some action plan ! Shall we ?

MWLL

Manage personal energy

This is one of my best ever Harvard Business Review reading, that explains it all.

Making of a corporate athlete (http://www.emilybarnes.com/docs/corporateathlete.pdf).

(Its pretty much a myth that life is a marathon. Its actually set of small Sprints followed by rest/lull. At least for people like us. )

Delegation

There is always something we can handover others to do. For them to grow. For us to get a break and make bandwidth to grow.

One thing to be careful in the delegation business though - you can not delegate everyone equally. There are some people you need to delegate the

tasks. There are some people you need to delegate the responsibilities. If responsibility is delegated to some one who is worth taking care of tasks, you will end up doing double work ;)

Set expectation

Both at work and to friends and family. How much work by when ? How many dinners together a month ? How many movies with lunch table in a quarter ? ;)

Communicate

There is no such thing as over communication (in most cases). Someone out there has a easier way to do what you are struggling with.

Blend it

Work and Life. Have plenty of fun while at work. Have a core group of friends (like I am blessed with :). Celebrate small things. Get some work done from house.

Join a company that allows flexible timing and working from home.

Stay close to work :) Dont spend precious time in commuting to and from work.

Grow at your pace

(this one not all going to like). Dont look at someone else's growth and try to mimic it. Compete with only yourself :)

LWML

Why is this important ? If one is not successful at work, it creates certain social pressure that can erase your fun that you having with life.

Work comes first in the term/phrase Work Life balance. Of course enhance skills and watch other successful people. Have a role model at work.

May be not in the right place in terms of work ? May be not enough ambition to succeed ?

Key is most of the MWLL pointers help in this section to increase Work part !

LWLL

Something is fundamentally wrong.

This state needs a lot of soul searching. DNA tweaking. Medication.

Are you at the right place ? Is the place bigger than you ?

Is your family worth having around ?

I had an employee who did not do great at work and she was neither having fun in personal life too.

I spent many hours listening to her issues.

It was a case, where she was not keeping up with work pressure and did not have adequate pace and skills to fare with rest of the team.

She was carrying the stress home. In her home, her parents were adding more pressure to that. She was physically handicapped and finding a groom for him in Indian society was a challenge that was bothering her parents. The end result was, a lot of frustrated people and yelling at each other every night.

The end result was coming to work to feel even more dejected next day.

It was a genuine case where luckily things were not related to maturity of the person. I did coach her for a while.

Provided some of the suggestions for her to take up a job in a service industry with much less challenging work profile and move to a different country (for a while).

Her family did she her value addition when she went away too far. She came to terms with work as she could handle that. And the foreign soil taught her self respect.

She started respecting her work.

Most importantly -

Thou shalt not procrastinate !

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Told ya ! It is going to be a lot of preaching and obvious stuff ! You were forewarned ! :)