Achieving a balance between work and personal life is a huge challenge, regardless of whether you’re in college or have a full-time job. In my senior year, I juggled two majors and a minor. That was on top of ten job applications a week and dozens of prep interviews. I was exhausted. The lack of social life leads to pure misery. Then I graduated and thought that I’d finally have free time to travel and see my friends. I was wrong.
So I began researching strategies of successful entrepreneurs who seamlessly managed to kill it at the workplace and lie on the beach every weekend. Here are the five best ways to achieve work-life balance and feel fulfilled.
1. Choose a career based on passioChoose a career based on passion
In the years after graduation, I’ve worked in quite a few fields. I’ve been a door-to-door salesman, a banker, made juice at an organic fruit shop in Spain, harassed people as a party promoter and put in hours as a business developer. Though most of these gigs were 8 hours a day, leaving me with 16 to use however I liked, I still felt like I had no time to relax. Truth is that when you work in an industry you don’t care about or hate, your mind will constantly be anxious and mere minutes can feel like hours.
The solution is simpler than you think. A habit of successful people is to align goals with passion. It took me two full years of bouncing between jobs I didn’t care for to finally gain the courage to pursue my passion for travel and writing full-time. Now, I can work from anywhere. The best thing is that while I sucked at sending cold emails, I get lots of business and compliments on my travel essays because I genuinely put care into my work. I can’t stand being bound by a desk in an office, so the freedom of working from a laptop in Bulgaria, Malta or Spain is just what I need. I set my own hours, so I can work whenever inspiration strikes.
If you want to be successful, you have to build a career in the field you’re passionate about. This way even when you spend hours at a time working, it will feel like mere minutes. If you don’t like what you do, you need a career transition.
2. Set your agenda early
One common mistake people make when they try to budget their time is failing to set an agenda. Having a clear timeline of what you’ll do when lets you budget in yoga and family time while still meeting deadlines. I go super old school and break out a notebook. Every evening, I write out the following day with a half hour margin of error. This allows me to wake up, have a coffee while reading the news, exercise and start checking tasks off. Before outlining my schedule, I had lots of time traps where I’d just sit around watching Netflix and munch on snacks. Set a clear timeframe and stick to it. There’s nothing worse than having a ton of energy and not knowing what to do with it.
3. Disconnect from technology
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Wait, why would you shut your phone off if you’ve got 20 emails waiting in your inbox? Simple - your brain needs to relax. Just like your legs get sore after a 5K, you brain gets tired after hours of continuous staring at a screen. Set aside at least a half hour or an hour a day to go outside and walk. Put your phone on airplane mode. The fresh air will clear your head and you’ll come back recharged. This way you’ll finish your projects faster, so it’s a win-win.
Don’t try to cheat the system and answer messages during your tech-free hour. It’s proven that multitasking doesn't work, so allow yourself some time to simply relax. Your Facebook and email will still be there when you come back. If you struggle to find time to hang out with friends, invite them on a hike. I use my hikes to catch up with people or to call my mom. Working long hours doesn’t mean that you have to sacrifice social life and health. After all, why are you working so much if you don’t feel fulfilled?
4. Meditate
Meditation is a deal-breaker when it comes to work-life balance. It will raise awareness of your thoughts, helping you prioritize tasks and identify emotions. I knew it was time to check it out when I saw that dozens of successful entrepreneurs from Tim Ferriss and Oprah Winfrey, to Twitter’s Jack Dorsey, swore by it.
What is meditation? That’s a fair question. A common misconception is that you have to sit down with legs crossed and try to empty your mind of any thoughts. That can’t be more wrong. Meditation is simply the act of keeping your body still for a few minutes, observing how you feel physically and paying attention to your breathing. Do you have to suppress your thoughts? Absolutely not. In fact, you can just observe your thoughts as if they were cars on a road and you were watching them from the side.
I had tried to meditate and failed a few times in the past. I recently picked it back up and am on a solid 70-day roll by listening to Headspace. All you do is a ten-minute practice whenever you like, guided by Andy’s soft voice with a calming English accent. Meditation has some cool health benefits as well, some of which include reduced levels of stress and anxiety, improved focus, and better self-awareness. Give it a go, I bet you’d get hooked.
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5. Work smart and do not sacrifice sleep
People tend to get this insane sense of pride if they can manage to get things done and sleep only 4 hours a night. Unfortunately, sleep hacking is a terrible idea. Arianna Huffington started a “sleep revolution” after she collapsed from exhaustion. Plus, let’s be real - sleep is amazing. We all enjoy it and we honestly do not need to deprive ourselves of it. Getting a solid amount of shuteye is a habit of successful people you should adopt for a better work-life balance.
Now, how do we work smarter vs harder? Working long hours may seem like the obvious solution to reaching our goals. It’s actually not true. When I had to spend eight hours a day sending emails to prospective business partners, I was wasting my time. The solution was to automate the whole process. Did you know that through a simple mail merge you can email up to 200 people at once? If you put automated systems in place, all the work you’ll have to do it contribute creative ideas. The rest will be done by technology for you. This way, with one hour of work you can free up an entire afternoon.
Take a page from the successful entrepreneur book and try these five strategies to fine-tune your work-life balance.
