Don't have a lot of time, but still want great advice you can use TODAY to begin to increase the integration of and balance between your work and home lives?
Here are five articles that are well worth your limited time.
ONE: How Working Parents Can Feel Less Overwhelmed and More in Control by Daisy Wademan Dowling offers an realistic, approachable plan for how to manage your nightmare of a to do list and gain back some sanity in your life. The author's steps include applying known business principles to your home life - like "Knowing Your End Game" and "Investing Your Time Accordingly." My favorite tip is to "Schedule a Regular Power Outage" (aka downtime!).
TWO: For many working parents, leaving work at work is no easy task. Harvard Business Review's How to Forget About Work When You're Not Working by Art Markman offers additional real-life tips you can begin using this evening or weekend to help you really step away from work and pay attention to your life at home. My favorite tip: Step away from work - and watch disaster not strike. He is right - pretty much all the time, the world at work does not end if you skip a night of email.
THREE: While it does not offer a wealth of earth-shattering advice, this comprehensive infographic on Entrepreneur.com is entertaining and a good reminder of all the little things parents need to do to ensure they have at least an ounce of balance in their life. A good reminder can be found on tip #9: Be yourself and avoid comparing your efforts to other. The "comparing mind" in an evil beast that brings mostly negative feelings - and conquering it may be a life-long effort for some (aka me). That said, awareness is step one! (And here is a bonus fantastic read about the not very helpful comparing mind.)
FOUR: More concrete advice from my favorite resource - Harvard Business Review - about how to tame work to have a better overall life. Entitled Manage Your Work, Manage Your Life, authors Boris Groysbery and Robin Abrahams offer a number of statistics - and really interesting insights gender and work/life attitudes- that help us understand why we feel overwhelmed. The article is long, but the advice is spot-on and well worth the read.
FIVE: The Gottman Institute offers the Marriage Minute, an easy to read email series focused on improving relationships, based on decades of research by Drs. Jane and John Gottman. Way oversimplified: the doctors believe that relationships need care and feeding to grow and flourish. One of my favorite articles talks about setting strong, yet realistic expectations in a relationship, and is sample of the type of info you can find on their site.
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