Work Life Balance and How to Achieve It Properly

This podcast begins with a story that helps us see the importance of work-life balance & how to achieve it properly.

“Let me introduce you to Devon.  Devon was a high-powered lawyer for a big firm on the track to becoming a partner.  He had a great wife and kids, a huge house and a vacation home, lots of money and lots of prestige.  Whenever his family needed him, he was always easy to find because if it was before 4 am, he was almost always in the office and the work stress was killing him.  As you can guess, Devon was on his way to losing his health, family, and sanity but boy would he have lots of money to drown his sorrows in.  Thank G-d, Devon realized in time that he needed to implement work and life balance before experiencing a major shock, like losing a loved one or having a heart attack.  He changed positions to another job with just as much prestige but gained control over the number of hours he worked. Now several years later, he works from home over half the time, and his most frequent activity is reading with his grandchildren and playing with his kids …”

How to achieve a healthy work life balance.

Well, here are some suggestions I’ve learned from many experts along the way and in the transcription of this podcast you’ll see the link to my website  therabbiwhogotrichonsunday.com where you can review the notes of this podcast episode, complete with the full details.

A few of my favorite examples include:

Tim Ferris in his book “The 4 Hour Work Week” taught me the importance of looking at all of the tasks on your plate and prioritizing which you should pursue and which you should automate, delegate or eliminate.

Stephen Covey in his book “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” taught how to identify the big blocks in your life and place them into your calendar first.

Rabbi Noah Weinberg of Bleesed Memory taught from the life of Abraham how to utilize every moment in life.

Work Life Balance Tips

What follows are a number of work life balance tips that give you focus on what is important about work life balance & how to acheive it:

1) Prioritize what is most important to you in terms of work life balance.

As one of my Rabbi’s (Rabbi Noah Weinberg ) used to ask would you rather be happy or rich?  If you’d rather be happy, make a list of the things that make you most happy and add two things to that list every day for a month.  Then prioritize the list from most to least important.

Some will be easy like family is a higher priority than a sports car, I hope.  Some will take a lot of thought such as your eyesight versus your sense of touch.  But at the end of doing this for a month, you will have your priorities crystal clear, and you will know your “WHY” in other words the reason you want work life balance and want to put in the very real effort it will take to follow these work life balance tips!

2) Learn to pay yourself first.

Every month you should  pay yourself first by taking a few hundred dollars off your income and depositing it automatically.  I know that this is hard to do, but if you don’t your bills won’t magically disappear, and you’ll never get ahead.  Until you earn more, there is always more month than money but somehow if you “never had that money” to begin with “you’ll make do just like always”.  If you need help budgeting so you can get by with a few hundred less or earning more, there are many ideas I could recommend.

The first use of this money that you pay yourself first, is to avoid one of the biggest issues you will ever face that will put you into work life imbalance – unexpected debt.  If you have savings to cover emergencies so you don’t go into debt when the boiler breaks or you unexpectedly need to take time off, you can avoid the number one cause of serious debt.  I suggest you put from 3 to 6 months of living expenses into a special bank account only to be touched when these occur.

If you are already in debt, then take a step back and use those few hundred dollars that you pay yourself first  to pay off your highest-interest debt until it is paid off.  Once it is paid off go to the next highest and add the amount you were paying in interest for the first debt to those few hundred dollars until it is paid off.  Continue this way, always adding the amount from the last interest payment to your new total, until you are totally debt free.  This is called snowballing which I learned from Dave Ramsey, and trust me, I was in as bad debt as it comes, so I know how long this takes and how difficult this is. Trust me, getting to being debt free gives you a quality of life that is amazing and worth every sacrifice.

3)  Schedule in your calendar the things that make you happy

Every week go to your calendar and block out one action that you will take to enjoy the top 5 to 10 people or activities that make you most happy from your priority list.  Playing a game with your kid, date night with your wife, weekly bible study, reading your favorite author, maybe even taking an extra power nap!  If you block in these work life balance tips just as you would an important business meeting, you will have just achieved a huge first step towards a healthy work life balance ratio.

Work Life Balance – How do I do it?

You’re probably asking, where do I get the time to do all that, I’m already too busy!?  Tune in to the next podcast episodes when we discuss other topics of how to achieve work life balance, including but not limited to:

• the magic of “creating time”,
• making a full-time income with part time effort,
• work life balance best companies,
• remote work,
• work life balance while working from home,
•  managing your time and other top work life balance tips.

“As always, I like to include references to other sources of quality information about Work Life Balance & How to Achieve it. If you go to my website, The Rabbi Who Got Rich On Sunday DOT COM you can click on Podcast and search this podcast episode to access a content-rich transcript full of links, pictures and more.  You can also access a link to that web page through the show notes, if you are listening to this podcast on any of the popular Podcast platforms. ”