This week in the UK is national Work-life week promoted by Working Families – the UK’s work-life balance charity. Work-life balance is a tricky subject, right? I think it is a modern dilemma where we need to balance life and work as more parents have working households, not just one person bringing in a salary. The ‘life’ part doesn’t have to include kids. It can also mean creating a balance and space from a job.
I wanted to raise some awareness of this today for communications people out there and share my thoughts and experiences on this topic spurred on by this charity’s work and some recent feedback from my network about how they create work-life balance. I wanted to raise the topic from a certain angle, mine, and provide you with some tips and advice based on getting it wrong over many years!
I have also created a ‘productivity stack’ for you.
Let’s dive in!
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Full Transcript (unedited)
This week in the UK is national worklife week promoted by Working Families – the UK’s work-life balance charity. Whose mission is to remove the barriers that people with caring responsibilities face in the workplace.
This week National Work Life Week, released a snapshot of how the UK’s working parents and carers are feeling about their wellbeing at work, and their ability to get a good, healthy balance between their work lives and their home lives.
They carried out a YouGov survey of 755 British parents with children 18 or under, who were either working or on Flexi-furlough in August 2021. The stats are alarming
A staggering third of working parents surveyed said that the people who work the longest hours are the most respected by senior leaders in their organization. We need to get rid of outdated working practices and focus on outputs, not time glued to desks #WorkLifeWeek
Work-life balance is a tricky subject, right? I think it is a modern dilemma where we have a need to balance life along with work as more parents have working households, not just one person bringing in the bacon. The Life part of WLB doesn’t have to include kids, it can also mean creating a balance and space from a job.
So I wanted to raise some awareness of this today Share my thoughts on this topic spurred on by this and some recent posts on Linkedin from people about how they create work-life balance and to raise the topic from a certain angle, mine, and also provide you with some tips and advice based on getting it wrong over many many years!
Let’s dive in!
Is it life or work that gets in the way?
Whilst I cannot answer that humongous question today, I do want to provoke some thought for my listeners around this topic during #WorkLifeWeek. Especially for the type of work I do in #comms which is deadline-driven and usually involves a lot of multiple tasks grouped into one big task like a campaign launch, for example. Not least if you throw in other responsibilities like health, kids or being a carer on top of your job.
But interestingly, I first came across the subject before I had children. I was working so much I had no life. All my hours were spent working or sleeping and it made me quite ill. I approached my employer and said I wanted to do 4 days as I needed to gain some perspective on my life and work less so that i could recover. They agreed and I fell pregnant within a year.
It was only then that I realized how hard it was going to be actually raising children alongside having a job. This has little to do with career and everything to do with trying to do two things super well or at least to a reasonable standard.
Over the years I have tried, succeeded and failed to gain a balanced, and it continues to be a struggle now the children are older and need much more of my time and mental and emotional capacity, which equals headspace.
I rely on life hacks, so things that make my life simpler, i live a hacl and always on the lookout for doing things better, not harder. It’s one of the reasons I am self employed as i can make a difference working smarter not harder. Managing time and productivity i have found is a huge part of this, and there are lots of tools i have found and used that have helped me. I thought I would collect these together in a productivity stack. Here’s are my tips on approaching productivity and productivity ‘stack’ there’s some approaches and some tools so you can create your own personalised ‘productivity stack’
Approach to the task’ tools’;
- MIT first
- An accountability buddy
- Take a regular break and reward yourself with something; hot chocolate, lunchtime swim whatever
- Saying no
- Snooze your notification / Turn off social media
- Be kind to yourself / don’t beat yourself up
- Time blocking
- Eat the Frog – I don’t use this one but it’s similar to MIT is why
- The Pomodoro technique
- Eisenhower Matrix
- 2 minute rule
- Productivity planners/notebooks – structures my day and helps me work through what’s important and needs to be done – goodbye long rolling ‘to-do’ lists! Here’s mine!
Tech tools
- Focus down by using timers – The Pomodoro Timer online or buy a tomato!
- Using translation services Translation instead of typing up notes; Otter, Rev.com
- Campaign planner or ‘to do’ planner that works for you – I like to visualize my tasks; Asana, Trello are great for this or Lister for making notes
- Calendly – take endless emails out of the process! I link to it in my email
- Pocket – save and read later once it’s filed you are free to carry on with what’s important rather than being side-tracked by
- Scheduling; so may, Buffer, Calendly, Social Bee
- Toggle, Clockify
- Evernote, notes; Inotes on my phone is a lifesaver, I just take note on the go, add photos, and pdf them to myself or others post-meeting. Long gone are the days of typing up complicated notes
- Google Docs and sheets and file synchronization – saves time on saving and storing files, attaching to email etc and also make collaboration smoother and quicker – amends are easier to track also.
I hope you enjoyed this episode today. Let me know if you have any tools to add? emma@henbe.co.uk