Leave Your Work at the Office

More than 2,300 Beyond.com Network visitors responded to a poll “How often do you bring work home?” Surprisingly, only 34.71 percent said, “I never bring work home.” A majority of survey participants responded that they bring work home either once or twice a week (23.09 percent), everyday (29.82 percent) or only on the weekend (12.38 percent).
There is no doubt that with our 24/7 work environment there are more demands being made on our time. May companies are requiring their employees to work longer hours both inside as well as outside the office. Despite these new demands you can still find a health work/life balance by working smarter and setting priorities and boundaries to more effectively manage your time.
Don’t get me wrong establishing a good work/life balance is challenging, but here is a Sanity Saving Tip that will help:
Sanity Saving Tip: Maximize Your Peak Energy Time.
There will always be more to do than you can ever accomplish in the time you have available to you.
One of the keys to work/life balance is to get control over your time by changing they way you think and deal with the never-ending responsibilities that flow over you each day.
We spend too much time on what I call Junk Time. This is the equivalent of Fritos or marshmallows. This is the time we waste on activities before we get to the main task, leaving little room for it.
For example, a person can sit down at his computer fully intending to compose the important memo that needs to be sent out soon. When the computer boots up instead of going straight to the word processing program he checks his email and ends up spending 45 minutes. Email is a classic consumer of junk time. Other dangerous consumers of time include your cell phone, instant messaging, newspapers, magazines, TV, or colleagues who stick their head in your door to say, I don’t mean to interrupt you, but…”
There is a time of day when you are mentally at your freshest, most able to concentrate and think clearly. This is your peak energy period. For most people this is the morning. Figure out when your peak time is. It’s important to know when your energy peak comes and to make sure you use this time to your full advantage doing your most important and demanding work during this time.
Remember, do first things first. Identify the five things you must accomplish on any given day, and then pick the one you absolutely have to do first. This becomes your biggest and ugliest frog. This is the task you must do first. By doing that task first, in essence you eat that frog first—and in so doing you relieve some of the pressure and make the rest of your day much, much easier. It’s a great strategy. But unfortunately most of us leave the biggest and ugliest frog for last—hoping it will go away or somehow become easier. It never does.
However, when you accomplish your toughest task early in the day, it sets the tone for the rest of your day. It creates momentum and builds your confidence. In other words, tackle your most important priorities immediately.
In other words, do the important work first. Put an index card on your desk that reads DO IT NOW! The flood or email, voicemails etc is like a riptide that will pull you out to sea never to return.
The ability to concentrate single-mindedly on your most important task, to do it well and to finish it completely, is the key to great success and work/life balance.