If your work-life balance seems to even worse than it was last year then you may wonder what you might be doing to encourage this to happen. So here are the ways to have an even worse work-life balance than you have now.
- Be unaware of boundaries. Make sure you in no way define them so that others can step over them whenever they want to. Because you are hazy about what you should be doing at any time those you work with will be equally confused.
- Do everything yourself because you are the only person who can do those things. In now way delegate any task to anybody.
- Procrastinate as long as possible in relation to any task you have to do. Wait until you are asked several times before you even consider when or even if you will do it.
- Let any notion of time management fly out of the window. Be vague about when you will don anything and be incapable of knowing how long anything will take you to do.
- Never make any decisions, just go along with whatever someone else decides that you ought to do.
- Eat anything but especially fast food and takeaways. Miss meals if possible and then stuff yourself with high fat sugary foods because you can’t be bothered to choose more carefully what you eat.
- Never take any exercise or doing anything much apart from work.
- Decline any social invitations and ignore your family. Because you are too exhausted to do anything except work.
Of course this is meant to be a bit tongue in cheek. However if you notice some truth in it for you what can you do to go the other ways and improve your work-life balance?
- Define boundaries because when you are clear about what is or is not acceptable so will the people who work with you be clear.
- Get support and help from colleagues because a problem shared is a problem halved. Don’t struggle with a difficult clinical problem, talk it over with someone who has experience of something similar.
- Make time for yourself because when you care more for your health and well-being your clinical practice improves too.
- Be more time aware because when you know what you want to get done in a period of time then you are more likely to succeed with it.
Most of us would probably identify with most of the “do nots“ here
Many of us though would probably locate the locus of control for most of this outside ourselves.
A good example may be e mail messages whilst on holiday.
I am on holiday the week after next!
Plan:
A turn blackberry off.
B out-of-office message redirecting query.
C advising of holiday in advance and setting expectations out.
Will it work?
Instructive to me that there is always some inroad that can help.