Tips: Making Time, Pausing, to Enjoy Your Life

With smart phones, iPads, and laptops, it's easy to be always on and always partially in the moment. It takes courage and commitment to unplug, to attempt a work/life balance.
 

 

Yesterday a group of bloggers got together for Blog Brunch, a monthly meet up group on Twitter where bloggers share their experiences around a topic of interest. April's topic was Work/Life Balance.
 

Balance is especially important to bloggers as many of us blog in addition to full-time jobs and in addition to being parents. We're constantly spinning multiple plates and attempting to keep them all from crashing to the ground. Work/Life balance requires letting go and moving forward when less important plates fall.
 

My blog, The Road to The Good Life, is a lifestyle blog focused on Home, Family, Food, and Fashion. I blog about my life and the components that for me make it a good life. I try to live first, blog second. Identifying what I'll share (and what is fair game for me to be acting like a paparazzi) and what I won't share (activities where the iPhone and the camera are put away and I'm in the moment) is critical for balance. This means that sometimes, if a planned activity falls through or caring for an under-the-weather toddler changes my schedule, you might not see a post. Working with an editorial calendar and more effectively estimating the amount of time posts will take (staging, photography, post-production processing, writing, research, and so on) means this should happen less frequently. Currently, I publish posts between three to six times a week, with at three to four themed posts. But life happens.
 

Are you able keep a work/life balance?
What tricks do you use?
 

Here are some of my tricks for balancing work and life and everything in between.
 

Tricks for Work/Life Balance

• Pause to enjoy your life. Make time to be with the people you love. After all, aren't they why we're doing the things we're doing? We can all accidentally get overcommitted. Scheduling time to disconnect and just enjoy yourself and your family gives you perspective.
• Take a breath. Often we say yes without thinking. If your plate becomes too full, evaluate what's important and what's not. Cross off anything that's not important. Discuss ways to delegate other activities. If you can't delegate, see if you can approach it differently. Something that was an isolating, thankless task might be able to be transformed into a fun group activity.
• Allocate your time for different activities. If you only have twenty minutes a day for creative endeavors, find projects that satisfy you and fit with your time constraints.
• Weigh new and current projects against goals. If a project doesn't match one of your goals, pass. If a project initially matches a goal, but later doesn't, transition off it.

Ciao Bella!

Eden!

 

Credits: All layouts designed by and images taken by Eden Hensley Silverstein for The Road to the Good Life. Sunday Sayings is a weekly series, published every Sunday, featuring an inspirational quote or a motto along with an anecdote of why I chose it.