Top 5 Techniques: Balancing the See-Saw of Life

Hello, fellow See-Saw-ers! As promised in the last post, for the past month I have been beavering away, reading, hearing and watching all about the many and varied strategies for finding a healthy work-life balance. To continue the furry animal analogy, I’ve used myself as a guinea pig, experimenting with all manner of weird and wonderful life management techniques. From the astonishingly anal to the breathtakingly devil-may-care, you name it, I’ve tried it. Well, okay, not if it was illegal or anything, but you get the idea.

1. Keep a diary and identify smart vs long working hours.

If you don’t know where to start, try keeping a record of what you spend your time on every day. I’d recommend keeping track of things as you go along, if possible. Or at the end of the day if you can trust yourself not to conveniently ‘forget’ that it didn’t just take you ten minutes to hang up the laundry, but thirty because you got caught in a Twitterstorm about your favourite upcoming TV series – to be fair, far more interesting stuff than hanging socks.

And if you’re as anal as I am, you can even colour code the activities into different areas of your life, i.e. work, family, social, hobbies, relaxation.

Do this throughout a typical week, or as close to one as you can get. At the end of said week, take some time to sit down with your diary and work out where the balance currently lies. You may be surprised. You may finally get an answer to that age-old question: where does the time fly?

If this works for you, you can incorporate it into your permanent daily routine in the form of realistic schedules that give everything (including following Twitter gossip, if that’s your jam) its time. Fellow perfectionists, this could be a game-changer for you. We all know if you’re going for a perfect result, you could be there a good long while, but if you know you’ve only got one hour to finish this task according to your own schedule, you may surprise yourself and find you’re still able to get the job done.

Think smart, not long; balance, not achievements.

2. Write a list of things that you find fulfilling and do more of them.

What makes you feel proud of yourself? What makes you feel happy? And what makes you feel like your day has been worthwhile? Big questions that I for one am still thinking about. Again, the important thing here is to recognise that your answers don’t have to hold true all the time. People are complicated, with ever-changing moods and priorities, so it’s okay to have confusing or seemingly contradictory things on your list. And the act of writing it down may make things clearer to you.

If in doubt, try out a few new hobbies to see if they can bring back an element of joy that has perhaps been missing in your life. Yoga is a case in point for me, because it makes me feel good physically AND mentally at the same time, and leaves me happy and ready to take on the world.

Anything that does that for you should be at the top of your list. Once you’ve made your list, look for opportunities to do more of your top three. Is there a class or workshop near you that would help you get into your new hobby, or even retrain so you can make your passion into your career? Or if it’s a solitary activity, is there a particular time of day when it’s easier to get a space to yourself?

3. Take a break.

Once you’ve worked out which area/s of your life you currently spend most of your time and energy on, step back and take a break from that part of life for a bit. If it’s work, use some of that holiday you’re sure to have racked up by now. If you’ve been spending most evenings out with friends, try getting comfortable in your own company at home, and vice versa. And if you’re a freelancer, use the power of the word ‘no’ to take the pressure off and book out some time in your diary (at least a week) that will be free of deadlines. I know it’s difficult to arrange, but if you were ill, you would take a break. And if you’re reading this post, I’m guessing your work-life/see-saw balance might not be the healthiest.

As we’ve already seen last month, an unhealthy work-life balance is currently being touted as the biggest cause of mental illness around. Not something to be sniffed at.

Plus you’ll be surprised how quickly you find out what matters to you when you just stop and take a breath. When I stopped – the stressful temp jobs, day job applications, funding applications, networking, writing competitions, even the emails and social media – I was amazed by how little of that I missed. Essentially the only thing I missed was the writing itself – hence this blog – and a sense of connection to the outside world, which I have largely replaced with more regular catch-ups with my closest friends.

So take a break, and when you go back, do what you can to adjust life according to what you actually missed.

4. Create boundaries in time and space.

Not quite as Doctor Who as it sounds, this simply means deciding on a particular time and place for different areas of your life – compartmentalising, if you want the fancy psych #101 speak for it. While I appreciate this can seem near impossible for freelancers or small business owners, where you are often working from home and feel under pressure to be ‘on call’, it can be incredibly freeing. You’ll find it’s a bit of a battle to begin with, but it’s well worth figuring out a strategy to achieve boundaries that will work for you.

Let people get used to the fact that you only send emails, say, 10AM-11AM. This will help you out big time when it comes to not letting work invade your leisure time (and space) or vice versa. Boundaries are especially helpful if you struggle with sleep in any way, as research shows that good sleep hygiene involves stopping work a set amount of time before you go to bed.

If you are the kind of person who finds that time flies by without you noticing while you’re on your electronic devices, doing emails, social media, work or any of the above, set alarms for yourself on your phone. I’ve even heard tell of a piece of software you can download onto your laptop that will lock it periodically, to ensure you take breaks for food, exercise, fresh air, or whatever is healthy for you. Because the sad fact is these things don’t just happen. There will never be enough time for them if you don’t make time for them.

5. (Because we all know the best lists come in fives) Listen to your body.

I know, get me going all hippie yogi on you. It may be a huge New Age cliché, but it’s true. Stress and anxiety are responsible for a heck of a lot of physical ailments, some of which have quite terrifyingly become the norm in certain circles. If you’re not sure what I mean by that, when was the last time you heard someone engage in an ‘I’m more sleep-deprived than you’ competition? For me, it was only last night.

But the fact is this is a dangerously unhealthy way of living. If you are running your life at such an imbalance that your body is constantly hurting or unable to perform vital tasks such as sleep, there is something wrong.

So quit moaning to your peers about your stress headache/insomnia/heart palpitations in the same sentence as you’re taking on more work, and MAKE SOME CHANGES! NOW!

And on that note, I’d best be off. I’ve got ballet in a couple of hours, and a few film festival trips and coffee meetings to arrange before then, both social and professional. Something for the body, the heart, and the mind – or at least, that’s the idea!

Thank you so much for reading. If you enjoyed this post, pretty please like it and leave a comment below, whether it’s just to say hi, tell me what you liked and didn’t like, or make a request for the subject of a future post!

My next post, out on 1^st November, will be about confidence. What is it? Is it all just a con? And the million dollar question, how do we get it? Another huge topic, and I can’t wait to get stuck in! In case you didn’t see my last post (and if you didn’t, why not check it out now? ! ), the plan is to post one long, thoroughly researched article per month. This is because I don’t want to bombard anyone, and I want to make sure I consistently test out the ideas I find in my research, guinea pig style, before suggesting you try them. So take care, check out the links to useful articles below, and let me know how you’re getting on with your own see-saw balance! See you back here on 1^st November. Xx

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A creative wellness blog by Amelia Nashe