How Coaching can Help With Achieving a Work/Life Balance

Separate the wood from the trees and bring your life back into harmony. Enjoying a healthy work-life balance can give you the time to appreciate the fruits of your labours.

You’re busy. In fact you’re so busy you can’t remember the last time you took a holiday. Weekends seem to be a blur in which you stuff your personal life, but only if there’s nothing left over from the office to focus on. But despite all this work, you never seem to feel like you’re moving forward – the world is on hold and you keep meaning to catch up with it, but you never quite do. Does this sound familiar?

If it does, don’t worry. You’re not alone. Many successful business people struggle with maintaining a work-life balance. In fact early in your career prioritising work can often be the best strategy for promotion and recognition. Sadly, you can’t maintain this pace for your whole life. In the end, if you don’t get a life outside of work – you’ll burn out inside work. Working with a coach can help you remain productive and regain your personal time too.

But I don’t have time for a coach!

Yes, you do. The first thing you need to do is to take a step back. If you’ve been working all the hours of the day and night, you can’t afford not to make time for a coach. What if a couple of hours with a coach could give you back 20 hours a week? Trust me, it’s not unheard of for a little thinking time about what’s really important to free up this much time or more. So it’s not that you don’t have time, it’s that you’re afraid to make time. You’ll have to make a small leap of faith, in order to get your life back.

How a coach can help you with your work/life balance

It’s important to recognise that a coach doesn’t have a magic wand. They can help you understand your own priorities and work load, and help you identify areas of potential change to get back control of your time. However, you have to commit to making some changes or the situation won’t improve.

Here’s how a coach will help you identify time sinks

Your coach will want to walk a mile in your shoes. They won’t be making value judgements about the things you do on a daily basis, but they will be helping you to make those judgements. Many very busy people find that when they walk through their daily routine they begin to identify habits and practices that aren’t actually productive.

One really common example of this is a by-product of the information age – checking e-mail. E-mail is an important tool for achieving business objectives, used wisely it adds great value to our work. However, many of us (this writer is guilty of this too) find ourselves checking e-mail far too regularly. There’s a sneaking suspicion that if we don’t – we might miss something important. We’ve forgotten that that’s what the telephone is for. Checking e-mail doesn’t seem to take too long – a quick scan of the in-box and you’re back in to your work. Or are you?

Research shows that we take about 15 minutes to settle into a task and work on it at full speed. It also shows that breaking off from the task even for a few seconds, puts us right back to square one. Learning to manage your e-mail might only free up a few minutes a day directly, but it can free up hours in increased productivity on other tasks.

Identifying and eliminating time sinks is a great start to improving your work-life balance. In fact, when most people examine their work time in depth – they find that over half their time is taken up with time sinks that add no value to their work at all. Imagine having the freedom to cut half your time in the office – without having to sacrifice the quality or quantity of your output!

The joy of managing your time more efficiently is that you get to indulge in real life again. You don’t cut corners, you don’t endanger your career – you just become more productive in the time you have, without having to work harder to do so.