In today’s world, many people find it difficult to separate work life from personal and family life due to different factors such as, for example, new technologies that make us be permanently connected. Not setting limits and not separating work from personal life can lead to health problems such as mental and physical exhaustion or problems of conciliation, difficulties in maintaining and taking care of social relationships and of oneself.
8 TIPS FOR SEPARATING WORK, PERSONAL AND FAMILY LIFE
Set two bands
Differentiate your day and don’t alternate time between professional and personal. Observe what your day is like, how much time you spend at work and set a time slot to divide your day in two. One band will be the time you spend working and the other will be the time you spend interacting with your environment and yourself. If necessary, set a schedule. It seems obvious, but establishing this division helps us to commit and enjoy a full balance.
Planning
To separate your personal work life from your personal life you have to dedicate some of your time to planning. Dedicate one moment a week to organize and visualize tasks, plans, activities and place them in a calendar or agenda, according to the time each one of them requires. It is essential to assign them a space and commit to following it.
Prioritize
When we have many things to do and we believe that the week will not give us enough time to carry out all the tasks, before planning, it will be very useful to classify the tasks into essential, desirable and unnecessary. Indispensable tasks are those that we cannot leave aside and that if we avoid them can lead to negative consequences. The desirable ones are important but not urgent, and the unnecessary ones are tasks that are a complication and provide very little benefit.
Division of tasks
Separating work and personal life is something that men and women should do equally. Remember that the sharing of household and family tasks is the first step towards gender equality and a necessary step for all people to be able to reconcile their personal, family and work life. People in the same family or living together have the responsibility to share all tasks equally.
Communicating and asking for help at work
One of the reasons many people tend to take work home is because they don’t get it all done. In these cases it is advisable to communicate your situation to your team and ask for help. Doing so does not make you incompetent, does not make you selfish, and does not harm your professional growth. Asking for help before it becomes a serious problem and knowing how to delegate is synonymous with self-confidence, intelligence and responsibility.
Setting limits with the use of technology
Thanks to technology we can communicate 24 hours a day with anyone, wherever they are, but if it is not used properly and limits are not set, it can absorb attention and cause a person to spend more time working than they should. If you have a work cell phone and a personal cell phone, once you leave work, one recommendation is to disconnect them whenever possible. If you use the same one, activate only calls to avoid constant browsing or create accounts with different users, one for work and one for personal life.
Set aside personal time
Always save one moment a week to share it with your environment. Taking care of personal relationships is vital for emotional health and helps to separate personal life from work and family life. Personal life is not about family, but about making time for friendships and, of course, time for self-care and individual activities that make you happy and take care of your health. Doing sports, for example, is not only beneficial for the body, but also for releasing tension from work and improving mood.
Afterwork
Afterwork has become very widespread in recent years, although it has always been done under other names. These are informal gatherings of coworkers outside working hours where they can have a drink, talk and release tensions among themselves. It is normal to talk about it as part of the same working group, but it should be avoided, as far as possible, to make it the central theme. Outside of work, you should separate your work life from your personal life, because it is already part of your free time and it is a perfect time to share opinions on other matters that do not involve having your mind set on your professional obligations.