Fixing limits to stabilise your work & life

In today's busy world, prioritizing between work and personal life can be a huge challenge. A poor work-life balance can result in stress, despondency and reduced productivity. Since we spend the majority of our time at work, in the absence of priorities, the work can bleed into our life outside the workplace. Fixing limits is therefore, essential if we want to be both physically and emotionally healthy.

Workplace pressures have increased manifold and together with them, there are a plethora of distractions that add to our problems. It is essential that all distractions are overcome and limits be fixed to attain some sort of a work-life balance. This can be a rather difficult affair, but is inescapable in the interest of your well-being.

When you decide to fix limits, you actually decide to alter your attitude and outlook to various issues related to your work and life. Resultantly, you are able to safeguard different features pertaining to them that you cherish the most. If you think that you will be able to stabilise your working parameters and personal obligations without drawing lines somewhere, you are mistaken. In fact, drawing lines to achieve a good work-life balance is a perquisite. And drawing lines call for having a positive outlook.

Fixing limits is a difficult proposition largely because of an apprehensive mind-set or feelings of remorse. You could be apprehensive about the consequences and ramifications of affecting changes to your way of working. When you alter the manner in which you do things, some difficulty could be brought about for others. You may not want to hurt the feelings of others because you may feel that in doing so, you could be seen as a self-seeking individual. That may prompt some feeling of guilt in you. However, if you are focussed in your approach and aim for your career and job success, all such apprehensions will be inevitably discarded. This is precisely the reason why efforts in this direction seem to be a real grind.

Fixing limits necessitate saying “No’ and safeguarding one’s time.  During the course of their work time and also leisure, most people are unable to decline and cannot protect their time. This is because assignment of tasks at workplace is a never-ending and thankless activity. Vexation, exasperation, regret, repentance and dread are bound to be generated in the process. In the light of the foregoing, the entire process of fixing limits or laying boundaries has to be gradual and done in a phased manner so that you do not succumb to the pressures of frustration and anxiety.   

Fixing limits facilitate protection of your time, personal freedom and vivacity. But before you actually get started, you need to be clear about:

· Raison d'être for creating limits: Your intentions and rationale behind fixing limits could be many. You may want to finish an assigned task much before the deadline. You may want to have adequate time to pursue your leisure activities or spend moments of togetherness with your family. It is also possible that you have not been able to hang out with your friends and feel that henceforth you need to engage yourself more in group activities with them. When you view the reasons to fix boundaries, you will be able to generate attention and thus serve to remind yourself of your urgencies and primacies if you cross a limit set by you.

· Prerequisites of declining & to whom: The maiden step in drawing lines is to identify issues to which and persons to whom you need to refuse. Your refusals, denials, negations and refutations need not be very categorical or uncompromising. You could acquiesce to a limited extent and yet achieve your aim. To illustrate the point, you could be asked to stay back after working hours to supervise some activity. You know that you cannot spare time for it on a routine basis, but do not want to say a straightforward nope. So, you agree to do it once a week. Your volunteering to chip in once a week is actually a refusal but concurrently also an acquiescence of the request.

By managing organisational aspirations and the hopes of your colleagues pinned on you as also setting practical boundaries, you can take charge of your work responsibilities better. You will thus be able maximize your chances of a long, rewarding and fruitful career with adequate time up your sleeves for other pursuits as well. But the inescapable requirement is to bring about an alteration in your perception of what is significant in establishing the limits for the merger and steadiness of work-life balance that you seek. As you start putting into operation some methods, you will feel the difference in you and in your relationships with others.