Top Tips for Balancing Life and Work

Just about everyone these days has to figure out a way to balance life and work. Use the following tips to help you achieve just this. 


1. Defining and Setting Your Priorities - regardless of how much you would like to get accomplished each day, you only have 24 hours. For this reason, you must learn to set your priorities. 
Take a look at all the things you want to get done including:

• Being successful at work
• Exercising more often
• Spending more time with your children
• Taking an evening class
• Now you must determine which items are most important to you. If you want to spend more time with your children, then schedule certain time periods for this.  

While you may want to take an evening class, how important is this to you? Are you trying to improve your education to get a better paying job? Or is it for pleasure - define and set your priorities. 


2. Planning in Advance - there is no doubt that from Monday to Friday you are extremely busy. If preparing meals is difficult and you tend to resort to fast food, start planning and preparing meals on the weekend. You could cook up a large roast or chicken on Sunday. Use the leftovers for Monday's meal. Make up a large batch of soup or spaghetti and freeze some for during the week. With a little advance planning and preparing you can feed healthy meals to your family and reduce your eating out budget. 


3. Share Responsibilities - this applies to both your job and your home life. If you are feeling overwhelmed at work is it possible to delegate certain projects to a co-worker? Talk to your boss about this, they may not even realize how overwhelmed you are feeling. 
At home you don't have to be the super parent, there is nothing wrong with asking for help. Delegate chores to your children, even young children can help tidying up and vacuum. 

If you and your spouse need a break ask another family member if they could watch your kids for the evening or weekend. When was the last time they stayed over at their grandparents? 

This can be a great way to free up some time to spend together and both your kids and the grandparents will love spending time together. 

Use these top tips to add a sense of stability and balance back into your life. There is no need to feel overwhelmed at home or at work. Asking for help can bring you rewards you never dreamed of.