What We’re Doing Wrong
In 2016, overwork resulted in the death of 745,000 people worldwide. That was obviously before COVID-19 forced many people to bring their office home with them. We didn’t know it at the early stages of the pandemic in March of 2020, but our kitchen tables, sofas, spare rooms and even our own bedrooms would become our long-term offices. Many struggled with separating work from home; we seemed to always be on the clock. There were no excuses as to why you couldn’t answer that one email or handle one more task. You’re in your office, after all!
While we were locked down in our homes (offices) we stopped doing the things that required a bit of discipline like eating healthy, working out, learning about new subjects, volunteering and so on. It was and still is easier to maintain the habits that require the least amount of inconvenience. This is where we are going wrong.
Before March of 2020 we used to set alarms and wake up to do certain things. Grab breakfast, do a crossword puzzle and perhaps even squeeze in a quick workout. Now it’s a small miracle if we care enough to wear pants to our morning meetings. Brutal.
In this post I want to identify work life balance strategies so you can achieve long term success rather than simply implementing segmented interruptions in your work life balance.
Segmented Interruptions
Our lives are on a linear plane and based on how we choose to live our lives, we each follow a unique trajectory. Our short-term decisions, or habits, determine the direction of our long-term trajectory. For example, your dietary and exercise habits will undoubtedly shape the trajectory of your long-term life. Likewise with the way you choose to spend the hours of your day.
Your repeated habits reinforce the direction and curvature of your trajectory. The only way to change your trajectory is by changing your habits. However, changes we attempt to make and fail at making simply become segmented interruptions. An easy example to understand is a diet. I hate diets. Diets do more harm than good to our bodies, our confidence and our wallets. By branding your segmented interruptions as a diet, you are telling yourself and everyone around you that you are committing to making only a short-term change, but soon plan to revert back to your old eating habits as soon as you reach some semi-specific goal, or more likely fail at achieving that goal.
This segmented interruption sounds something like this: I am going to go on a diet before my summer vacation in order to fit into certain clothing. It’s semi-specific because it’s time-based, but if the goal is to fit into summer clothing, what happens when we finally are able to squeeze into those shorts? We fall back inline with the trajectory that we were on before the diet. The diet is the segment, the failure to achieve the short-term goal is the interruption, and your normal habits (i.e. your path of least resistance) is your trajectory. Now, you’ve spent money on new clothes, if you succeeded you gained short-term confidence by fitting into clothing for a summer, but destroyed your confidence when you either fail or revert back to your unhealthy lifestyle in the cooler months and sent your body into a very confusing and unhealthy spiral of change that is likely repeated seasonally. This behavior accelerates your trajectory into a negative direction doing the opposite of what you intended. Please, stop!
These segmented interruptions have bled into some other aspects of our lives, too. You’ve struggled to separate work from home, your poor habits like screen time have increased, your family time has decreased and the stress you feel is now something you’ve learned to accept instead of finding long term habits to combat these disruptions that ultimately change your life’s trajectory in a negative way. Sound familiar?
Work Life Balance Strategies for Long-Term Success
You don’t have to be a morning person to change your habits. Likewise, you don’t have to be a certified dietician to eat healthier. You simply need to change the way you brand your habits to yourself and to other people. Going on a diet commits you to short-term effort. Changing the way you eat commits you to shopping differently, ordering from a different part of a menu when you’re at a restaurant, choosing water over soda and so on.
Try to map out what your day currently looks like. Be honest with your mapping; you might know that certain habits are netting negative results, but writing them down and owning them will help you identify where a change is needed.
Now, let’s try to find some areas where you can improve. Do your best to build in eight hours of sleep first. Then take inventory of the number of hours you need to work versus the amount of hours you’re actually working. By the way, checking email every 30 minutes doesn’t feel like a big deal, but that’s a segmented interruption disguised as productivity. Set ground rules with yourself, your boss and your team and ask them to do the same.
While mapping out your day, identify areas where you’d like to fit in activities that positively affect your long-term trajectory. Based on our initial mapping of sleep and work, you’ll have roughly eight hours per day to add positive and healthy habits like cooking a leaner meal, relieving stress by visiting family and friends and increasing your heart rate with exercise.
This doesn’t have to be hard. If you’re spending too much money on things that add no value and don’t have enough money to pay for things that do add value, you would be doing the same exercise. Why not do that with the rest of your life? Below are my five suggestions of some healthy habits that you can implement right now that would change your life and set you up for long-term success.
- Set an alarm in the morning and work on avoiding the snooze button. You set an alarm for that time for a reason.
- Write down your goals for the day in the morning and take inventory of where you succeeded and where you failed. Write down the reasons you failed.
- Identify some lifestyle changes that you’d like to make. Implement these changes slowly – going for them all at once sets you up to fail. Try to improve your proficiency every day. You’re tracking process in #2 above will help you stay on track
- Pay attention to your mental health. It’s common for us to feel overwhelmed or stuck sometimes. I talked about finding stress-relieving habits in this post, but I also invite you to make therapy part of your weekly routine.
- Exercise. Again, you don’t need to be an Olympic athlete to focus on physical health. Going for a 30-minute walk or jog, weight training and other forms of movement will go a long way if you build it into your daily routine.
These habits compound day after day and will ultimately change your life’s trajectory if you let them. Finding ways to be consistent for just a few months will turn these habits into a lifestyle and eventually performing them won’t feel like work or change. In fact, it will feel harder to revert back to your old ways and because you’ve changed your trajectory, your old habit will now become the segmented disruptions. You can learn more about this philosophy in the book Atomic Habits – a transformational book that will change the way you view habits forever.
Look, if you’ve read this far you’re probably interested in changing some of your habits. You’re also a little overwhelmed or perhaps intimidated by the change. That’s okay – own that feeling. It’s going to be that much sweeter when you are achieving the goals you wrote down, worked to stay consistent and became an expert at whatever it is has you overwhelmed right now.
So, where do you start? You can start here by booking a free 15-minute discovery session with me. My goal is to simply make an impact on people who want a better career, life and mindset.
Want to know more about me and my mission? Browse my resources and reach out if I can help you with anything. Be on the lookout for an opportunity to subscribe to my content in future posts!
