We often hear, “get it right the first time.” In today’s age of conflicting obligations and overflowing inboxes, the best advice for achieving a healthy work-life balance is to get it wrong the first time. Or at least to not worry about getting it perfect.
Creating a work-life balance is especially important for those who work from home. If you’ve created set working hours, it can be hard to stick with them when you know you don’t have to battle rush hour to get home.
But there are times when working late is inevitable, regardless of where your office may be. Have a proposal to research, write, and send out an hour before you hoped to punch out? Pretend you only have an hour and just get it done. Start to finish. After the hour is up you’ll have a finished product of some sort and you can weigh the value of improving your work or leaving well enough alone.
Even if you know in advance that this project takes precedence over anything else and overtime is inevitable, forcing yourself to throw together a rough version in an hour can provide substantial benefits. The process proves to be immensely helpful in getting your creative juices flowing. Focusing on the project as a whole gives you a better sense of the components that will take the most time. And finally, finishing a project, even poorly, provides the momentum that you need to power you into the wee hours of the night (that and a four-pack of Red Bull, of course!).
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Pingback on Sep 3rd, 2008 at 2:02 pm
[...] Temps at Le Bon Temps Roule offers this tip as a way to get last-minute projects and other time-consumers out of the way so you [...]
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Pingback on Sep 11th, 2008 at 1:03 pm
[...] Winner: Bon Temps [...]
August 20, 2008 at 4:13 pm
Work-life balance and working at home are topics near and dear to my heart. I’m an online editor and I work for a website geared toward technology professionals. I do my writing and editing from home. It’s a demanding job, and I find more and more that I have to work longer hours to keep up with the work. 9-10 hour days are not uncommon. For work, I recently had the opportunity to speak with a leadership consultant and psychologist, Dr. Henry Cloud, whose book on work life balance has just come out. I spoke with Dr. Cloud about the importance of establishing personal boundaries so that work doesn’t take over our lives. I found his words to be a clarion call about the importance of having balance. I hope you will, too.