How to Find Your Inner Peace Between House Work and Your Career
It can be difficult to find the appropriate balance between pursuing your career and doing necessary chores around the house in order to keep your home neat, clean and organized. If you try to do too much, you’ll feel stressed out and unhappy, while letting either housework or work obligations go in order to reduce the stress will leave you feeling irresponsible. Fortunately, there are things you can do to help find the correct balance and restore your inner peace.
Make a Time Budget
Just as you need a budget to help you keep your finances under control, a time budget can help you keep your time under control so that you don’t try to do too much and stress yourself out. Start by tracking everything you do for one week. The more detail you use, the better. Include things like driving to work, hours you spend at work and any work you do at home. You should also include time you spend doing personal things such as exercising or spending time with friends and family. Finally, track how much time you spend on housework.
At the end of the week, look at your budget and determine where you need to make changes. If you are spending an unreasonable time doing work activities, for example, you need to find ways to cut back on working. Decide how much time you want to devote to each area of your life and write that down. If you work full time, you probably have to spend a minimum of 40 hours a week at work, so keep that in mind, but you may want to cut back on extra hours so that you can devote more time to housework.
Prioritize
It’s important to prioritize your household tasks so that you don’t overwhelm yourself trying to make your house look perfect. List all the household chores that need to be done on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. Then rewrite your list, putting the most important tasks on top. If you have limited time for housework, which most working people do, resolve to do only these top-priority tasks and let the rest go.
It can be hard to do this because you may expect your house to look perfect all the time. However, in order to make the house perfect, you have to devote significant time to housework. If you’re working full-time in addition, this is a recipe for high stress. Breathe deeply and imagine what an acceptable-looking house, rather than a perfect-looking house, would look like. Aim to do enough to make your house acceptable so that you can cut down on the amount of time you spend doing housework.
Build in Relaxation Time
It’s important to take time to relax every day. Don’t work all day, come home, clean the house, and then go to bed so you can do it all over again tomorrow. If you do that, you’ll feel like all you do is work and you’ll get burned out. Instead, try to schedule at least half an hour of relaxation every day. Watch a favorite television, show, take a bubble bath or just lie back and do nothing.
The biggest obstacle to relaxing every day is feeling like you have a lot you have to do. For example, if you have kids, you may feel you can’t relax when you get home because you have to cook supper. To avoid these kinds of problems, consider cooking a large amount of food on your day off and eating leftovers at least a couple days out of the week so that you don’t have to cook every night. It’s also okay to go out to eat once in a while if you can afford to do so. Look at every obstacle to relaxation in this manner, asking yourself what you can do differently to make room for relaxation.
Assert Your Needs
If you are feeling overwhelmed, chances are you have taken on too many obligations. Help yourself by learning to say “no” to requests you just can’t handle, both at work and at home. You also need to ask others for help if you’re feeling like there’s just too much you need to do.
