Work/Life Balance: A Few Useful Tips

Working in Hong Kong means that you are constantly on the run. Whether it’s your job, business, family or personal errand, we are a generation on the go.

Finding the right balance between work and personal life is a life-long quest, that’s why I am very happy to share a few tips I read about recently.

Get your priorities straight

Find out what is important to you and how to allocate your effort.

Draw a large circle on a piece of paper. Create “slices” to represent how many hours a week you would like to devote to each role. My circle includes my business, education, fitness and time with friends and family.

 Plan, plan, plan.

Plan!

Use a calendar, notebook or better – an app to plan your week. A good idea is to colour code your activities (think Google Calendar) so that you can easily see to what “slice” of your circle they belong to.

Take control

The emotional high we get from doing a lot at once can result in mistakes or missing subtle cues. So when multi-tasking, take control of distractions. Turn off your social media alerts, email notification and mobile devices so that you can focus on your task at hand (even if it’s just for 30 minutes).

 Do not procrastinate

Procrastination in the act of replacing high-priority tasks with lower priorities. Putting things off till the last minute creates a similar emotional high to multitasking, getting you to feel stressed and out of control. In order to avoid this, rank your daily tasks, putting the BIG ones at the top of the list.