How to maintain work-life balance

‘You are always busy’ is no longer a compliment but feedback that needs to be acted upon. Here are four smart ways to improve your work-life integration. These are indeed interesting times when people work from home and shop from work.

You have heard before that 'integration is the new age work-life balance'. The concept of work-life balance assumes that work is separate from life, whereas work and life are not two separate things.

Work is one component of life along with health, relationships, growth and personal interests interconnected to one another and technology plays a catalyst in keeping it all together. Most of us derive a major portion of our self-esteem from what we do for a living and therefore being ambitious, getting ahead at work is complimentary to being healthy and enjoying quality time with the family.

If you are successful and happy at work, it will get manifested in your social relationships outside work as well. So how do you achieve integration? Here are some ideas:

Take control

That’s right; this is really the first step.

The feeling of helplessness is sure to drain your energy.

Create a composite to-do list which includes both work and personal items and keep ticking them off as you progress through the week.

As long as you tick items based on priority chances are you will meet most of your goals.

Also, start delegating non-crucial work immediately.

Start with the stuff that is truly below your pay grade.

It helps though to remember the quote from popular success coach Brian Tracy "Eat the ugliest frog first", so do the hardest and most important task first.

Crowd-source smart

Imagine the amount of time and effort you spend ideating, finding answers, looking for new ways etc.

This is where your social network and the communities come into play.

The problems you are trying to solve have already been solved by someone else out there and your network can enable you to think out loud and connect with the right people.

The time you save and the ability to invest them creating more personal time is always a welcome incentive.

Skill yourself

Remember the Stephen Covey rule 'sharpen the saw'.

As you improve your skills, there will be incremental gains in both your efficiency and effectiveness.

Part of being busy all the time is the lack of competence to get a job done in the time that it needs to get done.

Don't confuse activity with accomplishment.

Embrace technology

The availability of consumer technology has democratised how efficient one can be.

Think of meaningful apps that can enable you to create productivity hacks.

'Evernote' for note taking on the move, 'Drop-box' to store what matters in the cloud are all good starting points.

It is important to remember that while we all have more and more to do; it has become easier to get more done with less with the technology that we have available.

'You are always busy' is no longer a compliment but feedback that needs to be acted upon.

Work-life balance therefore is not a pit stop but an ongoing journey.

The author Deeksha Ramachandran works with a leading company in leisure and holiday space.

Rediff