Maintaining the Balance

Today is a day for reflecting on balance.

Yesterday I wrote about the need for building rest and recovery time into a training program. Giving the body and mind time to refresh before moving back into a period of heavier exercise. Today I acted on those words and gave myself a lighter day of exercise, going for a bit of a jog this morning, but nothing more for the rest of the day. Exercising like that is the plan for the rest of the week.

While the balance between exercise and rest is important, this week I am also being reminded of another important balance that most people need to find. That is the balance between work and the other parts of a person's life. I have been very fortunate in that for a few years of my life balance has been fairly easy to control and it sat heavily on the side of the other things in life, particularly exercise.

Since I have stopped training so much I have been finding that the balance is sitting more and more on the side of work. That has been particularly the case this week, with work making some fairly high demands on my time. These are demands that I am happy to suffer from time to time as they are part of the job that I signed up for. However, with this week being so busy I am also reminded that maintaining that work/life balance is something that somebody has to actively work on. If you leave the work/life balance to simply 'work itself out' I think it can be very easy to find that balance slipping more and more towards work and away from everything else.

The remainder of this week is looking like it is going remain busy at work for me, with a short notice trip to an offshore facility on the cards. As I have said, these sorts of busy weeks are part of the job and so this week isn't a big concern. However, once I am back it will be something I will be giving more of my attention to as I feel it has been a bit of a slippery slope of late.

Some might say there is a time in a person's life to do things like sport and having fun and there is a time in life to settle down, grow up and get on with being an adult. I think I agree with that sentiment of that idea, however, I have problems with how lots of people execute it. I certainly think that part of being an adult is taking on your responsibilities. However, too often I think people take those responsibilities to mean their job, when other responsibilities like their family and their healthy pushed to the back despite being just as important.

Unfortunately I don't have a nice easy silver bullet for maintaining a good work/life balance. In the end I think the trick to it is simply being mindful of the issue. Knowing when something is important and must be done today and knowing when something can wait until tomorrow and that it is time to go home. For a lot of us I think it really is as simple as that. Having a think about what is actually important in life and making an effort to prioritise those things.

Something to work on.