Learning Work-Life Balance: 7 Lessons from the 90s
This article is authored by Sneha Pandey, HR Manager at Lumiq. She discusses her experiences in promoting work-life balance in a growing startup. While we all need to achieve aggressive deadlines, she discussed how the management should ensure that the staff is not burnt out as a result of excessive over-working.
Not too long ago, having a healthy work-life balance meant being able to leave the office on time. For some, it was about spending more time with their kids, while others appreciated the opportunity to meet up with friends or go to the gym during their lunch break. Companies increasingly provided the possibility to work from home for a day or two each week to recruit new talent.
The COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdowns have transformed the nature of work-life balance. Today, thousands of professionals are trying to adjust to working from home full-time, and are learning that the boundaries between work life and home life are readily blurred. While the daily commute has vanished, it has been replaced by new obstacles, such as the tendency for work hours to bleed into the evening.
I grew up in the 90s and I think we can learn a lot from those nostalgic old days when life was a bit slower and you had more time to process things. This article will look at the 7 things that we can learn from the 90s for better work-life balance, regardless of whether you are working from the office or home. But first, let us see what exactly is work-life balance and why is it so crucial?
What is work-life balance, and why is it so important?
Over the years, the concept of what it means to have a good work-life balance has evolved considerably as new generations (with new expectations) enter the workforce. The benefits of enabling flexible working are more commonly understood as firms increasingly value the well-being and happiness of their employees.
Why? Because experts have found that work-life balance is just as helpful for businesses as it is for their personnel.
According to the Harvard Business Review, employee burnout costs the U.S. between $125 billion and $190 billion every year in healthcare. Meanwhile, five-year research indicated that employees who work more than 55 hours per week are 1.66 times more likely to experience depression in later phases of life.
With the given statistic, we are sure to know the importance of having a work-life balance. So without further ado, let us see the crucial factors that help us in maintaining a better work-life balance.
1. Know your mission and how it fits inside the company’s purpose
Would your 10-year-old self be proud of what you do today? We all want to feel important and will find balance in spending our time at work on activities that nourish our souls. When we are confident in our actions, we experience greater balance because we waste fewer hours delaying or psyching ourselves up for something we do not believe in.
2. Avoid waiting for perfection:
“Perfection is the death of all good things,” Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat Pray Love, stated. “It is the death of pleasure, it is the death of productivity, it is the death of efficiency, and it is the death of joy.”
If you’re not feeling as productive or efficient in your life balance, it might be that you’re waiting for things to be perfect before moving on to the next task. Eventually, you will have depleted your life’s balance with a stack of incomplete and flawed tasks, which feels fairly awful. Develop an attitude of ‘good enough and adaptable’ or construct a realistic image of success and attempt to gain a better understanding of how the extra hours aren’t benefiting your productivity.
3. Promote self-care opportunities:
When we prioritize our physical and mental well-being, we can bring our best selves to work. At Lumiq, we are encouraged to develop personal objectives for what we want to accomplish in life and then find accountability partners who will motivate us to be our best selves.
Perhaps it’s staying informed through reading, maintaining a consistent workout program, or prioritizing your mental health. By discussing these KPIs openly, you also strengthen ties at work, as you have a better understanding of who we are on a personal level.
4. Sleep should be a priority:
Not all of us are aware of how critical sleep is at the moment and how easy these words would be if we could simply get more! Begin recording your sleep now and come up with one thing you can do each week to improve it.
Determine what works best for you, which may not be the same suggestion that everyone hears (turn your screen time off an hour before bed). Have you ever experimented with delta wave sleep music? No? There you have it — your next experiment!
5. Accept help:
If you regularly feel as if you cannot focus or have had a busy day with no productivity, it’s time to seek out ways to unload yourself! Start by unburdening yourself and asking for assistance at work.
Nowadays, you may hail almost anything to be outsourced or delivered to reclaim valuable time. Most likely, your imbalanced self is impeding your progress. If you are suffering alone, you are of no use to anybody, and there are resources available to assist you. Your assistance may even be in the form of a coach to assist you in being more effective at what you do — we might all benefit from a coach to assist us in reducing stress and maintaining concentration!
6. Concentrate on a single task:
Maintain a daily “Successful If…” list.
What is the one critical task you must complete if your day goes awry? You can facilitate this by requiring everyone to share a reward and a priority. It’s remarkable how just mentioning your #1 priority for today motivates you to take action.
Accountability is your best friend when it comes to making each minute count. You cannot manufacture additional time, so manage your time purposefully, with an eye on the long term — not just the immediate term.
7. Choose to be optimistic:
According to a study, our brain is 31% more productive when we are happy. As a starting point, you can record three new things that you are grateful for each day. Choosing to be optimistic and beginning each day picturing how you would end the day with victory increases your chances of success by 31%.
To summarize, we often derail from our usual professional and personal, work-life balance. Which in turn causes turmoil in our forthcoming days. For maintaining the work-life balance, you can start by following the above-mentioned suggestions which not only apply to the present generation but have been working well even in the 90s!