Aoife Hughes outlines what life-work balance is and the steps you can take to break unhealthy habits and achieve equilibrium
Life-work balance often feels unattainable as we have a lot of time competitors, all champing at the bit to claim time and energy from us.
Life-work balance can be defined as a series of habit changes, powered by a permission mindset, vision, strategies and systems. The metric of success is time to invest into your self-care.
Here, I outline some key steps you can take to achieve the ultimate life-work balance.
Permission to embrace self-care
First, build a permission mindset to invest time into your self-care. This is a term that often incurs frustration as we feel we ‘don’t have time’ to invest into self-care.
Self-care can be seen across three lenses: physical, emotional and social health. They can be interlinked. Self-care is a strategy to manage emotional stress to ‘find calm in the chaos’.
We all experience chaos in life. ‘Big’ chaos can involve life-changing events such as moving house, having children or falling ill. ‘Small’ chaos is the day-to-day stress from getting to work on time, deadlines and cooking dinner.
Building boundaries and prioritisation are critical components to managing self-care and stress.
To deal with the chaos, and care for yourself, identify when you are stressed by noticing when your heart starts racing and you can’t concentrate. Manage this by inhaling for four seconds, holding your breath for seven seconds and exhaling for eight seconds.
Future vision
Design your ideal life-work balance by visualising what you want. Then, define your core values. These values are the deeply-held beliefs that guide your behaviours and decisions.
Building awareness about limiting beliefs that impact your thoughts, emotions and habits is key to implementing change.
Creating your goals involves change – something that is not easy as we are not conditioned for change. We are wired to stay within our comfort zone as we don’t have any emotional connection with something that we have not yet experienced.
To achieve your goals to reach your vision, you need to break old habits and start building new ones.
You can do this by identifying one goal to help you reach your vision. Change one limiting belief to build or break a habit to reach your goal.
And if you need extra help, the How to Run Your Home Like a Business Framework supports habit changes with strategies and systems to manage the physical and mental load that comes with home and family life to make room for self-care.
Building strategies
Building a strategy to manage your home and family life involves identifying your ‘partner in the business’. This can be your roommate, family member or life partner. Create a plan for the work associated with the home and family.
Look at the projects and tasks that need to be completed on a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly and annual basis – just like how you would approach project management in the workplace.
Next, look at your internal team, which could be your immediate family, and identify who your ‘village’ are. Leadership and asking for help are key to achieving success with implementing your strategies.
Finally, identify what projects you would like to complete in your home. Manage when you would like to have these projects completed by creating a prioritisation plan.
Systems management
Now that you have your strategies and team in place, building systems and delegation are the final components. Identify what your key pain points are in terms of managing the physical and mental load that comes with home and family life.
Give yourself permission to set a budget and invest in solving problems by expanding your team with external suppliers. For example, hiring a cleaner to manage weekly tasks will lighten the physical and mental load that comes with the home.
The key cyclical tasks related to the home are cooking, laundry and dishes. They come with a heavy workload as they need to be managed regularly.
Delegate ownership around these tasks by playing to the strengths of each partner. Delegation can be challenging. Working with the ‘progress over perfection’ mantra and accepting that tasks may be approached in a different manner, can help to overcome some of the challenges.
Leverage planning tools and applications to streamline the systems you create to save time.
Identify who owns a task that needs to be managed weekly, then create a system and schedule this task with an online calendar or app.
Begin at the start
Life-work balance is a fitness – you decide how far you want to take it. The hardest part is starting. Once you build your permission mindset and vision, however, you’ll soon find that the rest will fall into place.
Aoife Hughes is the founder of FRAZZLE
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