Think about your workweek. How many times have you traded off something important in your life for something important in your job? And how many times have you complained — or heard a friend or colleague complain — about feeling out of balance between home and the office?
Admittedly, work usually takes priority over the rest because work is what we spend the majority of our day doing. It financially supports our lifestyle, our families and it’s a core part of our identities. Add mobile technology to our career-driven lives, and work priorities now have the potential to intrude on our personal lives.
This threatens our relationships, health and overall happiness. Every day, we unknowingly hand over a little more power to alerts, texts and notifications. When we’re constantly bombarded with these bits of information, priorities and distractions start to run together, and we have a hard time knowing what to focus on.
How do you know when your priorities have gone awry?
When you’ve reached a point where the urgency to react to something is disproportionate to its priority, then you may have lost that precious equilibrium. Do you delay a scheduled workout because you feel compelled to reply to an email first? Do unread emails cause you stress even after a 12-hour workday? Do you check your phone during dinner? These are all signs that you have an imbalanced relationship with technology.
There are some ways to put your life in better balance — at least with technology. Among them: find a non-work related passion and wait 30 minutes each morning before checking your email or phone.
The most defining moment of your day is when you first wake up. You have a choice about the first information you expose your brain to. By meditating, exercising, journaling, or doing something reflective for those first 30 minutes instead of opening the digital floodgates, you allow yourself to start your day recharged and aware of your priorities.
Paul Herbert, Vice President of Solution Design at Symbolist Says:“This whole idea of work-life balance is starting to unravel before our very eyes. Some of us cling to it tightly, hoping we can continue to ignore emails, yammer and text messages between the hours of 6 pm and 8 am. But you know you can’t,” he wrote. “Work and life aren’t apart any more… and the reality is you must face is the fact that work and life are inseparable.”
"Up until the early 1900s… factories created the need and the opportunity for work-life balance,” he wrote.
Factory life meant shifts and predictable regularity in schedules. But, wrote Herbert, that approach no longer applies.
“That idea — of the clock as a divider between work-life — is history. The present, and the future, is about the merging of those concepts,” Herbert wrote. “Life is what we do. Life is the sum total of our actions and our efforts. Work-life balance isn’t about separation any more — it is about consolidation.”
The price of having your job is how much of your life you are willing to devote to it.
“The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.” - Henry David Thoreau:
This threatens our relationships, health and overall happiness. Every day, we unknowingly hand over a little more power to alerts, texts and notifications. When we’re constantly bombarded with these bits of information, priorities and distractions start to run together, and we have a hard time knowing what to focus on.
How do you know when your priorities have gone awry?
When you’ve reached a point where the urgency to react to something is disproportionate to its priority, then you may have lost that precious equilibrium. Do you delay a scheduled workout because you feel compelled to reply to an email first? Do unread emails cause you stress even after a 12-hour workday? Do you check your phone during dinner? These are all signs that you have an imbalanced relationship with technology.
There are some ways to put your life in better balance — at least with technology. Among them: find a non-work related passion and wait 30 minutes each morning before checking your email or phone.
The most defining moment of your day is when you first wake up. You have a choice about the first information you expose your brain to. By meditating, exercising, journaling, or doing something reflective for those first 30 minutes instead of opening the digital floodgates, you allow yourself to start your day recharged and aware of your priorities.
Paul Herbert, Vice President of Solution Design at Symbolist Says:“This whole idea of work-life balance is starting to unravel before our very eyes. Some of us cling to it tightly, hoping we can continue to ignore emails, yammer and text messages between the hours of 6 pm and 8 am. But you know you can’t,” he wrote. “Work and life aren’t apart any more… and the reality is you must face is the fact that work and life are inseparable.”
"Up until the early 1900s… factories created the need and the opportunity for work-life balance,” he wrote.
Factory life meant shifts and predictable regularity in schedules. But, wrote Herbert, that approach no longer applies.
“That idea — of the clock as a divider between work-life — is history. The present, and the future, is about the merging of those concepts,” Herbert wrote. “Life is what we do. Life is the sum total of our actions and our efforts. Work-life balance isn’t about separation any more — it is about consolidation.”
The price of having your job is how much of your life you are willing to devote to it.
“The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.” - Henry David Thoreau:
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