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If you need any tips or advice please contact Sinead Devlin on +353 1 6905040 or 086 0474172 or email
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Here are some helpful tips for this week............
Work Life Balance
What is it all about?
It is all about quality of lifestyle, balancing out worktime with quality of life. Gaining the work life balance must be your choice, your decision. You have to want to have Work Life Balance.
Year’s ago when you started work it was “a job for life”, now this has changed from people having 1 career and possibly 3 jobs in their lifetime to 3 careers and 12 -16 jobs in their lifetime. Obviously the latter comes into people making their own minds up, it hasn’t happened through redundancy etc it has happened by choice.
People are now more focused on achieving. The old Irish corporate atmosphere would have involved meeting a colleague in the corridor, exchanging pleasantries, talking about events of the weekend, sport etc perhaps holidays. This has changed, now when people meet their colleagues in the corridor, once the usual question of “how are you? ” has been asked the normal reply will be “busy”, then a brief discussion of “yep, yep, tell me about it” and the two colleagues rush back to their desks. But how do we achieve effectively when we are so busy?
There are two types of “busy”
1. Good Busy – whereby you are high on achievement, low on guilty feeling, and believe it or not possibly only need to work 4 out of 5 days to achieve our goals for 5 days. You have time to have a chat with your colleagues, you have time to go to the gym, you have family time, you can leave the office in the evening and close the door and leave it all behind you until the following morning.
2. Stupid Busy – you feel like you are not getting anywhere, feeling guilty about a lot of things (time spent on projects, time spent with family, time spent on you, time spent in that meeting when I could have been replying to all those queries in my Inbox? Holidays, how could I take holidays when I am so busy?). You come into work early, leave late, bring work home with you, grab a sandwich at lunchtime and gulp it down at your desk while you beaver away. You are not managing your time properly…
This is where the Balance needs to come into play. Which of the above Busy are you? Which would you prefer to be? How do you get to that level of Balance? This has to be your choice…….
For starters, just something very small and perhaps you might think silly….. People that sit at their work stations from between (possibly) 8am to 6pm with a minimum of a half hour lunch, are not doing themselves any favours. This leads to loss of energy, short term memory loss and the in-ability to solve problems. Where as if you are working the same hours as above, maybe less – just do something mind-numbing for two minutes, every 45minutes. This will help you calm down and be practical about the tasks you are doing. For example every 45 minutes, just take 2 minutes out to breath calmly, stretch, walk around, even shred some paper if it helps!! Chat to your colleague beside you, re arrange your desk – what ever it takes to take you mind away from what you are doing. You can be guaranteed that the decision you make after the 2 minute break will be a lot more logical than the one you could have made before you took the two minutes out!
There is also that dreaded subject for your Manager “do I need to be office based?”. We all have laptops, broadband, mobile phones – gone are the days of phoning into an office and all employees are present, most offices are mobile. Something else for you to think about…
It can be so simple to just get some part of Work Life Balance for you, but again you must decide, you must be able to discipline yourself, you must have a much more effective approach to managing your time. No-one else can do it for you!!
Other topics:
Effective Interview Strategy
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