How to Balance Your Work and Your Life

Originally published at our Metadevelopment blog.
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At Metadevelopment, we put a big focus on your personal life and sustainability of work-life balance. We do not think that your career and life are separate entities.

You work is influencing your happiness and well-being the same way as your general lifestyle.

We are focusing on mindset and actions. There are several things you can do to start balancing your life.

1️⃣ Start working with your wishes and wants.
You need a reference point to measure importance of various life aspects. The questions is: what problems do you want to solve yourself and what problems are not essential?

2️⃣ Start figuring out your values, purpose or mission.
At the very least, thinking about your mission and experimenting with your lifestyle and work to find your purpose will give you a general direction and motivation in your life. Start by reading a book called “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People”.

3️⃣ Learn some basics about happiness.
Taking this course is highly recommended! It is evidence-based and contemporary and won’t take you much time. If you want to dive deeper, read “Solving for Happy”.

4️⃣ Figure out your relationships with control and lack of control.
You can’t control much things in life: environment, weather, other people thoughts.
You can't even control your emotions, but you can control your behaviors - your response to emotions.
Stoicism philosophy is a great example of long-lasting mindset based around lack of control and constant change of the world. “A Guide To The Good Life” is a great book to have an overview of stoic principles and ways to apply then in the modern life.

5️⃣ Take responsibility for your own Balance.
As soon as you realize that you are ultimately responsible for everything that happens to you, your life will start changing. It is very important to take care of yourself.

If you do not prioritise your life, someone else will.
- Essentialism. Greg McKeown

Essentialism is a good mindset to start taking control and responsibility of your life and figure out right priorities. Taking responsibility is based around making choices and being OK with the consequences.

6️⃣ Start doing some experiments and challenges to figure out your fears and limiting beliefs.
Your procrastination and idealism are heavily tied to your fears. Your subconscious brain hides some information from you based on your fears. You are missing opportunities around you because of your fears.

7️⃣ Start consciously choosing actions and non-actions.
You need to commit to doing something as well as to commit to not doing something.
The thing is - you have already chosen non-action in some aspects of your life, you just have done it unconsciously.

8️⃣ Start designing your personal unique lifestyle based on your values, commitments and wishes.
Consciously choosing your ambitions and setting right expectations from the surrounding reality is a key for a sustainable life. Probing the reality and enhancing your mental models is the only pragmatic attitude to growth and self-actualization.

Do you want to grow differently? Join Metadevelopment and get new superpowers!