Year End Review Week 4: Work/Life Balance

Welcome to week 4 of your Year End Review.  In case you missed week 1, Clients, you can access that blog post here.  Week 2, Projects, can be accessed here, and week 3, Colleagues, can be found here.  

 I’ve created a really fun (and free!) workbook to guide you through this year end review process.  You can CLICK HERE to download your Year End Review Workbook. 

 Okay, so this week we’re going to focus on our work/life balance.   

The perfect clients, projects and colleagues will mean nothing if you are burning the candle at both ends and totally exhausted. What's the ideal work/life balance for you?  This week we’re going to shed some light on that!  

To highlight why this is so important, I’d like to tell you a bit about my story. 

I was very lucky to be able to attend a premier art school in San Francisco where I got my Interior Architecture degree.  The program was intense, and demanding deadlines and all-nighters were the norm.  It was common for students to make a bed under their desk for cat naps so they could continue working in the studio for days on end. 

I was exhausted, fueled by coffee and meal-replacement shakes (shelf-stable and easy to keep in the studio).  I was clearly being given the message that if you wanted to succeed you needed to work longer, harder hours than everyone else.  You needed to push past your physical "limitations" and produce.  Completely worn out, I would catch up on my sleep over school breaks and then dive back in and do it again for the next semester.

I took this mindset into my first design job out of school, working for an amazing commercial design firm in San Francisco.  Luckily all-nighters were no longer the norm, just 40+ hour work weeks, plus my hour or two of commuting every day, depending on traffic.  I attacked my working life the way I attacked my student life - working hard and putting work above everything else.  On the weekends I recovered and rested, too tired to enjoy much of a social life.  Without scheduled school breaks, I was too consumed by work to plan vacations or take time off and one day was very much like the rest, year in and year out.   I was living to work. 

Fast forward a few years and I was now self-employed.  I had learned my lesson well, and was continuing to work hard.  But something was starting to change in me.  I was getting tired.  Really tired.  I was having trouble focusing, remembering things, or even staying awake.  My old friends, caffeine and the adrenaline rush of procrastination were no longer doing their jobs.    

Multiple doctor visits and extensive testing revealed that I had what is commonly known as adrenal fatigue.  Basically, years of stress had done their job on my adrenals - my “get up and go” had “got up and went”.  Kaput.  

Clearly something needed to change.  I realized I needed to slow down.  I mean, really slow down.  Facing adrenal fatigue made me realize that I needed to put my own health and rest FIRST, and then plan my work around that.  I needed to prioritize my own work/life balance.  

In the years since those test resutls, I’ve made a lot of changes.  I learned how to delegate more fully to my team and my virtual assistant to take a lot of work off my plate.  I learned how to plan my projects and deadlines to avoid last-minute stress. I reduced my hours.  I now work at home instead of in an office so there’s no rushing out the door, commuting or traffic.  I can work on my sofa, in my jammies (and I do!).  I take a nap almost every day.  I go to bed early and wake up without an alarm.  And I now consider slow walks in nature, time off with loved ones and vacations essential to fueling my creativity.  

Things look a lot different around here and I finally feel like I have work/life balance at last.  I’m sorry that I had to be faced with adrenal fatigue to figure that out!  If you’ve been having trouble prioritizing work/life balance, I hope my story will inspire you to make some changes.  You don’t need to face a health crisis to make a change!  

 Okay, so let’s begin this week’s journaling exercise to determine your ideal work/life balance! 

CLICK HERE to download your free Year End Review Workbook.

Journaling exercise: Work/Life Balance

Find a quiet time when you will not be distracted and you can concentrate.  Pull out a journal or notebook and write out your responses to the following prompts:

1. Last year, my typical weekly work schedule looked like this:
2. I worked an average of _______ hours a week and billed an average of ________ hours a month.
3. Why this worked for me or not and how I felt working this schedule:
4. Next year, I want my typical weekly work schedule to look like this:
5. Next year, I want to work an average of _______ hours a week and bill an average of ________ hours a month.
6. Describe if you worked alone or on a team, and if on a team, who you worked with:
7. What is working well about this arrangement:
8. What can be improved about this arrangement?
9. Describe any changes to your team you'd like to work toward (for example, new hires or fires, increasing or decreasing the size of your team, working with new sub-contractors, hiring a VA, etc.)
10. How much time did you take off last year? What trips/vacations did you take?
11. How much time do you want to take off next year? What trips/vacations do you want to take?
12. What location/environment did you work in last year and was it an ideal situation?
13. Are there any changes you want to make to your work location/environment next year?

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So give it a try and I’d love to hear from you on Insta how it goes for you.  You can find me @designersanity.  

 Don’t forget to CLICK HERE to download your free Year End Review Workbook. 

 It has all the questions in one place to keep you focused.  Having the workbook completed will be a great record of your thoughts to refer back to and keep them top of mind in the coming year, not to mention a great record to look back on of your progress in future years!  

 Next week we’re going to put all the pieces of our Year-End Review together into a New Year’s Vision Exercise.  I can’t wait! See you then!