Work Life Balance - A guide to manage stress

Get Organized

Be attuned to your patterns of working, as well as your high alert, medium concentration, and down times during a 24 hour cycle. This will help you allocate tasks to appropriate times in which to complete them. Ultimately you want to optimize the time you have available in order to reach your goals. This means disciplining yourself to work on your most important tasks, even though they may only be bite-sized chunks of a much larger project, rather than do the quick and easy, less important tasks that will make you feel better to cross them off in short order on your to-do list but, in reality, will bring you no closer to your goals.

Create an action plan that includes your goals or objectives, your deliverables, the tasks that need to be done in order to produce your deliverables, with deadline dates, and quality standards against which you can be measured. This will help organize you at work.

At home, a family action plan, or chore list will not go amiss. Re-look at how you are living your life. If most of your time outside of work is spent driving the children around to extra-murals, then review your family priorities and find creative options that meet each individual child's needs while at the same time meeting the family's needs. Notice if you are moving items around the house in order to clean. If yes, then rather place one of each item needed in the relevant rooms. This will shave off minutes each day, which quickly add up. Avoid bringing paper from the mail into your home. Have a sorting station as you walk into the house - use the garbage bin, and the shredder liberally. Have
a "to file" and a "to action" slot handy.

Get Connected

Create and maintain a support system both inside and outside of work. It truly can help you withstand pressures that you may experience in your life. Do make sure that you fit with your job, your work area, and the organization. This fit must be in terms of needs, goals, performance required, competence, and the culture.

No one works alone. If you are in a position to do so, delegate to those who report to you. Use the 70% rule - if someone can do it 70% as well as you can, they are ready to take on the responsibility for the task, with some mentoring from you. Careful thought needs to be given to matching tasks to people correctly in terms of competence, experience, interest, and potential. Then delegation needs to occur with specific parameters set and communicated, authority handed over, and mechanisms for report back and feedback put in place.

Get Going

It is key to be challenged by what you are doing, to be committed to what you are doing, and to be in control of what you are doing. The challenge comes from introducing stretch goals into your life. It is not about overloading your system. Instead it involves building personal excitement for what you are busy doing. The commitment implies that you are dedicated to something in your life. This engenders steadfastness and a strong sense of satisfaction. The control that you need to have, or take back, in your life is crucial. It is the part that ensures you make a plan of action that truly reflects your priorities, that you clarify all expectations with your stakeholders, and that you take accountability for what you do and the quality standards at which you do it, as well as hold others accountable for their deliverables.

You also need to practice "selective neglect". Don't focus on anything that creates noise for you and the priorities that you have set. Relegate demands to the relevant level of attention.

It requires constant vigil to maintain a balance between vying work demands and between your work and your personal life. It is a work life balance juggling act worth perfecting!

Janine Sergay, President of The Sergay Group is an expert on organizational stress. As an Industrial Psychologist she has a strong academic backround about how stress affects organization's and their people, and has helped many over the years to cope with this delicate issue. Be sure to check our other Smart Talk articles.

Given the tough and challenging times we live in, it is in any organization's and business interests to tackle this issue!