How to Prevent Burnout by Balancing Life and Work
The life/work balance is a careful one to achieve and doing so requires the employment of various personal strategies in order to prevent burnout. One's repertoire of self-help methods may come in very handy in this regard, as only one who is deeply concerned with his or her own personal well-being will succeed in exercising these practices. Strategies for balancing life and work include budgeting time, practicing hobbies, and meditation.
Budgeting Time
It is necessary to properly budget your time in order to maintain a balance between your personal life and your business life. You may work, say, 30 hours per week and may not be sure what happens with the remaining eight hours per day of the weekend. Have you slept it off? Eaten a homecooked meal? Watched TV? While your management team at work ensures that they know exactly what you have done with your workday shift, you too should be managing yourself, maintaining a working knowledge of what you are doing with your "you" time.
It is helpful to design a schedule for yourself, which you can record via an online format or in an actual planner. You are advised to develop a breakdown of each hour of the day by activity. You should record the time you are to wake, the time you meet with your friend group, when you are to have meals, the time you are to engage in your hobbies. Maintaining a personal life is equally as important as maintaining your work life and it should be treated with the same level of severity. Doing this will make it possible to accommodate all of your personal needs on a daily basis. This will also mean that at the end of your days off, you will experience a sense of satisfaction similar to that you sense with a job well done—because it is one.
Practicing Hobbies
A hobby is a necessity, not a luxury. You need hobbies in order to engage in activities upon which you can reflect on your growth. You need to participate in something that you do not do for wages and are driven to do solely because of your desire to achieve in the area and the emotional well-being that engaging in the hobby delivers for you. Hobbies include gardening, reading, writing, attending lectures, and sports.
It is necessary that your hobby be something that you genuinely enjoy expanding upon. If you like to garden, it will bring you satisfaction to learn about plants of which you have not before heard and you will want to plant different flowers in the garden. If your hobby is trading on the stock market, you may want to spend your free time looking up stock analyst ratings. Learning about things relevant to your hobby is rewarding and helps you to feel a sense of personal growth.
Meditation
One practice that you may find useful in order to balance life and work is that of meditation. This is the practice of using a technique to train attention and awareness. This, over time, results in clearing the thoughts and a sense of overall calm. This can be achieved through viewing visualizations or through closing the eyes. Some people will listen to calming, slow music while they meditate. Others will sit in silence while they meditate. Focusing on breathing is a notably effective strategy used in the practice of meditation. This may entail allowing one's mind to concentrate on hearing the breathing or it may entail inhaling deep breaths, then subsequently exhaling deep breaths, as well. This is a practice that is widely popular across the world and results in benefits to health that are undeniable.
Preventing burnout is something that can be achieved by employing methods to balance life with work. These methods may include budgeting one's time in order to schedule specific events in one's personal life. There should be a careful plan established as to the hours devoted to personal time. Additionally, it is recommended to partake in hobbies that are beneficial to the individual's improved state of mind. Another practice that helps with balancing life and work is that of meditation. Meditation helps one to achieve a sense of calm and an overall sentiment of well-being