Do you find it difficult to switch off at the end of a working day? You are not alone. This week, I tackle that difficult balance.

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Script

Episode 164

Hello and welcome to episode 164 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.

One area that often gets overlooked when we start to build a productivity and time management system is balance. After all, we cannot and should not spend all day and night working. It’s not healthy mentally or physically and can have a devastating effect on our family and social life.

Yet, sometimes we just need to do the work. If you are starting a business, preparing for exams or in the middle of a big project, all your time and attention should be and needs to be on that endeavour. What happens to balance in those situations? Well, that’s what I am answering this week.

Now before we go any further, I just want to give you a heads up this will be the final episode this year. We’ll be taking a little end of year break. Don’t worry, we’ll be back on the 4th January. 

Okay, on with the show and that means it’s time to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.

This week’s question comes from Kevin. Kevin asks, Hi Carl, I am really struggling to find time for my personal life. I have been working from home since March and I find all I am doing is working all day and night. I don’t have any time in the evenings because that’s the only time I have to reply to email and I feel I spend all day in meetings through Microsoft Teams. Are there ways to help balance out the day when you are stuck at home all day, every day?

Hi Kevin, thank you for your question. 

I think the flexibility promise of working from home has thrown up some hard realities for a lot of people. At least when we had to go to an office to do our work there was a clear distinction between being at home and being at work. Now the two areas of our lives are being conducted from the same place and that removes a lot of barriers between our working lives and our personal lives. 

The first thing I would always recommend is you build in some structure to your day. What I mean here is you set a start time and a finish time for your work. Simple? Yes. But there’s a reason for this.

You see, if we have a start and finish time to do our work each day, we now have a psychological deadline. Part of the problem with working from home is we have no structure—a structure that is built into a workplace. When we go to a workplace we have a start time—be there for 9:00 AM—and we have a finish time—leave at 6:00 PM. This means there is a fixed time each day in order to do our work. Whatever we want to accomplish that day, we much finish it by 6:00. It sets a sense of urgency. We must finish this by 6.

When working from home, we no longer need to commute, we tell ourselves we can do another 30 minutes. There’s no rush to finish so we can miss the worst of the traffic or avoid being late for dinner. Tacking on an extra thirty minutes to our day does not carry the same consequences.

The problem is it does carry consequences. Not the same consequences, but consequences all the same. You start to get complacent about your working time. Those extra thirty minutes one day soon become the ‘new normal’, and there will be days when you work an extra hour or two and soon your whole closing down work for the day becomes very blurred. 

So, set a start time and finish time for the day and be strict about following it. 

Another area that quickly disappears is the lunch break. How many of you working from home no longer take your full lunch break? I know this one is incredibly difficult as that was one of the first things I stopped doing when I started working from home a few years ago. 

As there was no one to go and have lunch with, it was just much easier to make myself a sandwich and eat at my desk while processing my email. 

Now depending on where you live in the world, your lunch break allows you time to get outside and get some exercise in. Go for a walk. A tip here is if you walk twenty minutes down the road, then turn round and walk back home you have just walked for forty minutes and that is around 5,000 steps. Do that twice a day and you hit the magical 10,000 steps a day. 

My dog has benefitted a lot with me working from home. We go out walking every lunchtime and it’s a great way to get some air, refresh and reset ready for an afternoon session of work. 

You also need to make sure you are in control of your calendar because it is so easy to allow people to schedule video calls at lunchtime. First up, you need to eat and second up, you need your break. 

The number of people I speak to who have been stuck on Zoom meetings all day and realise they have not eaten or taken a break. No. You have to put a stop to this. 

Just as if you were in your workplace you need to be unavailable at your designated lunch break. And if having a meeting at you usual lunchtime, then make sure immediately the meeting ends, you take your break then. 

Okay, now for those of you who are saying to yourselves ‘I can’t do that, my boss expects me to be available’, then you have some questions to ask yourself. Are you really happy working for a boss from the 20th century who is clock-watching you? Are you happy working for a company that does not trust you? I know I wouldn’t be and I would be making it a goal for 2021 to find another company or another boss.

That takes care of the situation many people have found themselves in this year. However, there will be a day when we regain our freedom of movement and we can move around again. I’m not sure we will ever go back to the way things were before 2020, but a normal, of sorts, will inevitably come one day. 

Now, as a person who is self-employed finding balance is difficult for me. However, one thing I have learned in ten years of being self-employed is there will be periods when I need to be focused. For example, if I am recording a course, everything stops for two days. My calendar is blocked out all day and night and for 48 hours I pretty much live in my studio. I don’t check email and only check messages periodically—usually when I am making a coffee or a cup of tea. 

But, once the course is launched I take two or three days off. So, it’s a period of say four of five days of intense work, followed by two or three days of complete rest. 

You don’t have to be completely structured every day. Balance does not necessarily mean the ‘perfect eight’—that’s 8 hours sleep, 8 hours work and 8 hours leisure. Balance means making time for the things you want to do with the people you like doing things with. And the keyword is making time for it. 

It’s no good complaining about not having time. You do have time. You just have to make the decision to stop doing work and start doing the things you want to do. 

Hopefully, you already know you cannot push yourself through ten to twelve hours of work every day. There’s a point where you will get diminishing returns. Even in an eight-hour workday, you will start to lose efficiency towards the end of the eight hours. Pushing on will not get more work done. Pushing on likely leads to mistakes that need rectifying later—which results in more work. You need to rest. 

So, depending on the kind of work you do, the balance could be two or three days of intense work, followed by two or three days of relaxation. 

I can give you another example—a seasonal one. I’m a content creator, my work involves creating content. I also want to have a week of complete rest over the Christmas holidays so, this week and next, I will be doing some intense content creation certainly not being very balanced with my time. However, this means during Christmas week I will have no content to create so I can put my feet up, eat warm mince pies with brandy cream and spend a lovely Christmas with my wife and little dog. 

You may be seeing a pattern here, balance is all about getting in control of your calendar. That’s where you can see where you are spending your time. It can warn you about future over-commitment, it can also show you patterns from previous weeks. If you find yourself feeling a bit numb and out of sorts, just go back a couple of week in your calendar, you will likely see you have been pushing yourself too much and losing your balance. When that happens you can use your calendar to reset. Build-in some more relaxing days and take some time off doing what you want to do. 

Ultimately, you are in control of your time. Nobody can force you to do things you do not want to do. If you have no time for your friends and family because your boss and clients are demanding so much of your time, then you need to question your choice of career. Despite what you may read in the news, you can always change your job, no seriously you can. The job market is always tough, but that should never be an excuse to trap yourself into thinking the job you have today is the only job you can do. 

I changed careers completely in two of the last worst recessions. I quit being a lawyer in the middle of the dot com bust in 2002 and I quit my job as an employed English teacher to start my own teaching business in 2009. Was it hard? Yes, it was. Was it impossible? Of course not, It is always about knowing what you want, and then creating a plan to make it happen. 

Ask yourself what’s important to you? Then open up your calendar and schedule time for it. It’s simple. 

I hope that has helped you in some way, Kevin. Remember, you are in control of your time, so make it count. Take control of your calendar and make sure you structure your day. Have a start and stop time and build in time for yourself, your family and friends and don’t let anyone take it away from you.

Have a fantastic week, a wonderful holiday season and a joyous new year. We’ll be back in the new year.