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Achieving a work life balance

By Giulia Draycott

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If your life feels like all work and no play, maybe it's time to think about how you could achieve a better work life balance.

Before you sigh and dismiss the idea as impossible, ask yourself whose life is it anyway? If you don't have the courage to shape the life that you want, it's unlikely that anyone else will be good enough to do it for you.

So go for it and take a fresh look at how you could improve your work life balance.

What would a better work life balance mean to you?

Achieving a more harmonious work life balance could mean entirely different things to different people.

Perhaps you're longing to work fewer hours and spend more time with your family.

Maybe you need to get help with your domestic chores and free up more of your spare time. Or possibly, you need to do more rather than less - by getting involved in a community project or new social activity that could enrich your life.

Long hours hamper our lives

There's no doubt that the long hours culture is taking its toll on many of our lives. Just take a look at some of these facts:

• British workers clock up 36 million hours of free overtime each year, with one in three of us refusing to take all our holidays for fear of the backlog of work when we return¹
• Four in ten people think that working long hours has a negative impact on our family lives, with 35 percent of us thinking it harms our relationship with our children and a third saying it damages our relationship with our partners²
• Many working parents don't eat healthily or take regular exercise and feel that work dominates their lives, leaving family life to suffer as a result³
• Working long hours leads to increased levels of stress, irritability, exhaustion and depression³
• In contrast, part-time workers think they are more productive and people who work flexibly are less likely to take time off work for sickness⁴

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