Prioritizing Personal Life
January 28, 2009
Both career and family are equally important and sustain a man; sometimes an ambitious career path can get in the way of spending quality time with the family while at others, focusing on home chores alone can well be the reason for being sidelined for a promotion that was well deserved because it was common knowledge you were too bogged down with family roles to actually do more than your share.
With a little thoughtful advance planning (after careful deliberation about your lifestyle) however, you can learn ways to prioritize personal life so as to make separate segments and space for both a well-balanced personal life as well as a professional, successful one. Begin by establishing boundaries on both fronts, as not doing so is a sure-fire way of letting any relationship fall apart.
This means keeping personal stories at home and not discussing domestic problems at the office and in the same vein, not bringing office overload to the house to encroach on family time and make the family members feel its eating into their time with you.
Prioritizing personal life can include simple, effective actions and decisions like deciding a particular time-slot for your spouse and another for the kids (or combined joint family times doing things everyone can be included in e.g. playing a board game, making a video together, putting up a skit etc.) or just not taking any calls during dinner and an hour after that.
You can also talk it over with your immediate supervisor that you can work late only on a few specific occasions as you have family responsibilities and perhaps share the workload of a particularly urgent assignment along with a colleague. Perhaps you could have a mutual understanding of doing a ‘stand-in’ for each other when one has a personal commitment so work doesn’t get neglected.
Let your boundaries begin with you: perhaps you could get up a little earlier to have more of the day with the family if you have school going kids or breakfast with your wife, especially if she’s a working woman too or of the regular boy’s night out with the co-workers over the weekend, you could take the family out for a meal.
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