What is work life balance:
In easier words, work life balance is when you put work on one side of the scale and your life on the other, the scale should be balanced.
These two are sometimes so related that we don't even draw a separation line between these. Lets discuss what could be the possible reason that we intermix the two.
Reasons:
As far as I have analyzed, these could be the possible reasons why we focus on any of these more than the other. When we focus more on work, the possible reason could be that we love what we do. There are people who enjoy what they work, I, myself like to code and spend time in learning new concept to enhance my skills which lead to spending more time on work and less for my personal life. If you have younger sibling, you can relate more about them being complaining that you give less time to them. Sometimes, we are more goal oriented and so we define the short term outcome, for which, we do more effort to achieve them. This leads to excessive work. In a job life, we compete, we do hard work to get promotion, these all change our mindset to focus more on work and do things by thinking a creative and technical way.
Work-life balance, this term is often referred when someone is giving more time to work but there are instances when someone is giving more time to life and less to work. This arise a question, how could we possibly know how much time should we spend on work?
Balance?
There is no math formula that can tell us how much time should we spend on working. We have developed few standards over the time that formalizes the office time and weekend holidays, but a proper fit in our case could be figured by hit and trial method. We can first give more time to work by putting it on priority. Then, analyze how is your health and what kind of activities do your body require. In our work, related to IT, we spend the most of our time on chair so we can develop bad posture and less physical activities. A formal approach to address the issue is required so we can start by making the schedule for exercise or gym.
An important aspect of our life is our family. We need to identify the needs and expectations of our family. We might see someone around us who is working extra hours to fulfil the financial needs of their family. But money cannot buy everything and our family need the time with us. Taking a day or two off in a week and spending quality time with our family or taking them out can allow us to have fresh mind, develop harmony and understanding among the family members.
In the last, I would like to mention time monitoring as a good activity to track how much time we spend on the phone and on which apps. We usually spend hours just scrolling the social media platform or just chatting. When we keep track of our time we can assess those tracks and utilize our time for other useful tasks.