Integrating professional life and family life is a significant challenge that every worker faces almost every day. Balancing family and work indicates giving yourself evenly to both your profession and family without neglecting one over the other. Work life and family life are two different and separate worlds. Even before the advent of the internet and mobile phones and emails, the convergence of work life and family life was always there. The only difference is that the fusion of work and home was never as intense as it is today.
How to Negotiate the Work-Family Balance:
As per experts, one of the major forces that has been driving professional and personal lives collectively include the use of communication technologies. Every worker owns a mobile phone today and with the help of a smart phone, they can work anywhere and everywhere.
Recently, I came across several interesting write ups on negotiating work and family balance. The articles try to portray approaches that work generally for reconciling family and professional identities. Various researches have also been conducted and the findings of the results present a bleak picture. As per experts, the only way to negotiate is reconciliation on the part of the workers. They should reconcile the misalignments between professional pressures and family pressures. Another option is to make efforts so that you can transform your personal life into your work life.
Importance of Rearranging Priorities:
“Email as a Source & Symbol of Stress” is an Organization Science write-up penned in 2011. This write-up revealed that the communication activities that take place in today’s world is the cause of anxiety and stress that causes depression. We do not have control on incoming phone calls, emails and text messages that keep piling up before we can make up our mind to react in a particular way. Too much of information enhances anxiety as you keep thinking if you have missed some important information.
The study revealed that the newly introduced patterns of work often creates high and unrealistic expectations pertaining to response time, thus leading to further enhancement of anxiety and stress. As a result, you keep working for longer hours and continue checking text messages and emails more frequently from the time you wake up till you go to sleep.
Now the question is – “Is the aligning of professional and personal life a good solution to this problem?” This is indeed a difficult question. There are many career oriented and ambitious people who are married to their job. They hardly care about their family life as their job means everything to them. But if such a career oriented person gets fired from his/her job, it can prove disastrous to their life.
How to achieve a better work-life balance?
As we step into 2014, it is the best opportunity to realign the priorities by taking lessons from the past year. In order to achieve a perfect work and family life balance, switch off your work phone as soon as you reach home tonight and keep yourself away from reading business emails.
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