In a world constantly striving for efficiency and performance, we are faced today with one of the evils that most affects our state: stress.
It is a daily presence in our lives, constantly reminding us that we have to succeed in our professional lives, our lives as parents, our lives as individuals and our social lives.
We feel overwhelmed chasing after time to succeed in everything we do. But if there’s one thing that technological advances have yet to have an impact on, it’s TIME. For thousands of years, a day has lasted 24 hours and we still haven’t found the magic recipe for making time. So it’s up to us, as ‘human beings’, to tame this time and find a balance between our professional and personal lives.
1 Working time is becoming omnipresent
The way we work is changing, and the COVID pandemic has accelerated this upheaval.
Personally, I’ve been working from home for 4 years now as an entrepreneur (I was already a pioneer in teleworking!). It’s not so easy to define your workspace when you don’t necessarily have a dedicated room, when your environment reminds you of the many other domestic tasks you have to manage (the dishwasher, the children’s laundry, etc.) and when the children come home from school at 4.30pm and you haven’t finished your day’s work.
To remedy this, it’s important to learn to divide up your time and organise it.
- As far as I’m concerned, I’ve set myself ‘efficient’ working hours between 9am and 5pm (even if it means cutting back on my lunch break) so that I have a freer mind when my children come home.
- I take care of household chores after 6pm (and ignore all the environmental junk during my working hours).
- I turn off my notifications after 6pm. No more emails or answering the phone after that time because I’m no longer focused or efficient anyway 😛
2. Not listening to your body
The body needs to be in motion. Nowadays, we often spend most of our day sitting in front of a desk, where all the tensions of the day accumulate.
Regaining a work-life balance also means regaining a balance in your body. It means going to work on foot or by bike, to get your body moving and oxygenate your mind. It means taking a 30-minute break at lunchtime to do some sport or simply take a walk. It’s not time wasted, it’s time when dopamine will boost your body and your pleasure for the rest of the day.
3. Increasingly virtual social relations
Confinement, teleworking, closed restaurants and cinemas. Over the last 18 months, our social life has been sanitised, forcing us to spend a lot of time in a confined space with our families (with the added bonus of class closures linked to the COVID imposing this on us once again). So we have Zoom meetings with our colleagues, we call grandparents on Facetime and we send a few Whatsapps to our friends or tell them about our weekend activities on Instagram to keep in touch with people despite the ‘social distancing’.
It’s key to make time to ‘connect’ with others. As a mother of 3, working from home with a husband who’s often on the move, I’m constantly looking for that time ‘for me’, that time to chat with my friends which, in a very selfish way, allows me to take a break from my daily routine (go for a coffee, see a film at the cinema…).
This time is vital if we are to feel that we exist outside our work and our family.
In a nutshell...
To regain control over your time, it’s important to analyse how it’s managed and to put in place micro-actions that will help you gain peace of mind (this will be the subject of our next article 😉 ).
👉 See also ‘Welcoming an au pair: your role as a host mum’.
