If you want your life to be more than a series of meetings, emails, coding and sitting against computer; you are not alone. There are quite a lot of people out there, who wish to do this, and they just want to have a perfect balance between work and life. Some think they achieved it and some feel they are quite comfortable with the current system they are in to. But, in a larger perspective, it is indeed a problem faced by many people. Especially in much demanding IT/BPO industry, where staying late in the night is a norm.

Initially we feel stressed out and want to get out of this imbalance, but by the time we realize that our life and work are out of balance, our habits, expectations from life, responsibilities towards family/society and relationships have already changed. We end up creating our own system, which will be a culmination of our corporate culture, the position at work and our work habits. In this system we typically won’t be having any relationship beyond work relationships and no hobby beyond work. And this system works only when we keep the work at number one priority and rest all, at number two or three etc. If this order changes a bit, our system tends to fail or might not work at all.

This type of a system is designed to stay away from home, for longer hours, eventually our family, friends, relatives and the society will learn to cope up with our absence and ultimately they will develop routines which require our funding but not the physical presence.

It is important to realize at some point that a balance means not having more free time; its about living a fuller, richer life. It means putting the job at one of the things we do and aspire not the thing that defines our personality, our relationship and our behavior. Balance is not necessarily mean, working lesser hours- every one needs to work hard in this changed economical and social conditions- but balance does mean gaining control over when, where and how much work should be done.

Typically, this work-life balance issue is a personal matter and we need to solve this problem by ourselves. And this is becoming more important than ever now as a quite large number of people started to realize the important of this kind of balance in life. It not necessarily mean from health perspective, there are obvious gains from health point of view, but this is important from family, friends, social life and society point of view as well.

Rather than letting the work spill all over our lives, it is always better idea to work smarter. We can surely make use of the fact that, our corporate house needs the results and these results can be well achieved by working smarter, not necessarily working harder all the times. And this is what a successful manager does; work smart, not hard all the times. There are lots of techniques to work smarter like delegation, effective time management, proper planning of work etc. These all aim at managing our work in a better way.

We will be amazed to notice, how the new technology products like- BlackBerry, Handheld - computing devices, mobile computers- are adding its contribution to this imbalance. Agreed, staying connected gives a greater flexibility of having updates at any time and provides you an opportunity to give your suggestions when required, but on the other hand, it really spoils this work-life balance. Imagine a situation where you are on vacation and you got to respond to an urgent email from your boss, not only this spoils your vacation mood but also it adds back the office mood. Again in this case as well, balancing may not necessarily mean staying away from using these new technology products. But, indeed, one should know when to make proper use of it.

Some times this imbalance comes from our own system. Some of us have the personality by which we tend to think about work; while driving, while eating and while during relaxing in home. We never seems to get out of this work worries. In some extreme urgent matters, yes, one got to think about work, it is acceptable. But it should not become habit. Completely switching off might not be possible at first instance, but some people proved, you could archive to switch off once you are home. Important point is; we got to know when and where to draw a line between work and our personal life.

Highflying ex-CEO of GE, Jack Welch, in his recent book dedicated a whole chapter on this subject and he feels effective managers tend to learn how to balance work-life. So it clearly implies there is, indeed, a relationship between having balance and being successful at work.

As per a case study, this work-life imbalance mainly appears to hurt people in Asia and America, as they generally work hard. Europeans tend to take months together vacation to relax and bring back the balance. But, surprisingly their productivity, output and quality of the products they produce; not appear to be low compared to world standard. This obviously points to the fact that, there seems to be no direct proportion relationship between “working very hard” and productivity and/or output. We got to learn a lesson from this case study.

To summarize, this work-life balance plays an important role in building the focus and it helps to have a cool and composed mind. Which is of absolute necessity in this competitive age.

Santosh Kotnis
Fort Collins, CO, USA.
santosh_kotnis@yahoo.com

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