The Snitch

With longer working hours, emails that demand for your attention (even if you are out of the office), busy executives walk a fine line between juggling the demands of the home and the workplace.

“But having a meaningful career doesn’t mean sacrificing your personal life,” says LesValene Ngion, director of product development at SIM Professional Development.

Ngion shares a five-step-plan on how can you manage better this ordeal between work and family commitments:

Step 1: Get real

To begin, make a list of Work Time and Personal Time needs.  Quantify and qualify how much time is needed in each category. Then conduct a personal audit of your work-life using a simple SWOT (strength, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) analysis and access the results. Where do the  gaps between your current work time, personal time,and lifestyle commitments?

Step 2: Purpose driven

What is  your values and purpose in work and life? Reflect, analyse, and list down three to five items and focus on them. Stress and frustration may result if these values and purposes are not met. But remember, perseverance is needed to keep the balance!

Step 3: Goal oriented

As goals are seen as the end result from perseverance, setting them at an attainable level would help you keep focused and refrain from getting overly ambitious. Discuss these goals with people for additional morale support. Write down your goals in your PDA calendar’s ‘to-do’ list and set reminders about them on a weekly basis.

Step 4: Adaptability

It takes conscious effort and determination to obtain work-life balance as it calls for long term changes to your lifestyle. Compromises and sacrifices are inevitable. Sometimes, you’ll just have to say  “No” without having to feel guilty about it.

If you find adaptability a trouble, please relook back to Step 2.

Step 5: Evaluation

Since the continuous effort of evaluation is necessary to maintain work-life harmony, sustaining it is an even greater challenge.

Restart the five-step plan if bump into any major decision your work-life journey.

Ngion believes that work-life balance is obtainable. All you have to do is to choose, focus, evaluate to adapt, then keep moving!