Balance of work and home

Now a days a lot of us deal with the various pressures of work and home life and the balance between the two of them. For me it is a challenge because home is where quite a bit of my work is actually done so that sometimes makes the balancing of the too a little harder.

What can be a challenge when having an office at home is making sure that you find the time to walk away from that environment and remember that there are other things to do. Of course, the home office is where all the bills are paid for both work and home and even the email is mostly done in that area as well. What I have found works is normally around dinner time I will turn off the computer saying that the rest of the evening is going to be away from it and I will do other things. Now yes, I may walk away from the computer but my mobile device is always close by so that I can even deal with emails away from the computer. I just find that being able to walk away from the computer helps me make sure I have a balance.

There are times when the pressure of work does impact home and vice verse. There are the appointments that have to be done during the day that impact what I can do for work so that is one of the things. Another thing that impacts home life is when there is something that needs to get done and am working against a deadline. The deadline may mean that I work some evenings trying to focus on the task as I don't normally get as many business emails after work hours. The other impact to the home life is some meetings have to be held in the evenings so that everyone can attend especially for one client that I work with. This is partly because of dealing with the various time zones in Canada.

Making sure that you can try and balance both work and home is something that can be difficult. I know that for us the weekends are when we try to do quite a bit of the home stuff but there are times weekends are for work. If this is the case we are fortunate that we can actually sometimes take some time during the week to get the home stuff done as well.

Just make sure that you do take the time for yourself no matter how you do it. In the world today it is harder to totally walk away from work but you have to try. We have actually found a method that works for us and in some ways helps us work better. When we are feeling that stressed and overwhelmed feeling instead of getting more stressed we will go to the gym for an hour and workout. The gym is a great place to actually put a lot of the things you are dealing with in the back of your mind and let them sit there for a while. Quite a few times after getting back from the gym that task that was a challenge before is a lot easier as the solution seems to come a lot quicker.

So whatever you do remember that there should be a balance between work and home. Give yourself a little bit of time to ensure you are being you and not just the work person.