MYTH: My personal life is being impacted due to work pressure.
REALTY: The person should learn to deal with office issues only at work.
Often, it’s the company that is blamed when an employee’s personal life is in turmoil. He might attribute it to factors, like, long working hours and excessive travel. The stress at the workplace can transform into a feeling of frustration in domestic life. The stress may arise from a tussle with a colleague who used to be a good friend. But in most such cases, employees blame their manager for constantly finding fault, stretching the goals, etc.
There is no denying that a professional spends a large amount of time at the office, and so carries work-related issues home. In some cases, frustration at the workplace is taken out on family members. And when both partners are working, the issue becomes more acute over who can give a patient hearing to the other.
Most professionals go through the situation of work-related stress, but only a- few handle it well. It is easy to say that work should not be carried home, but then, technological advancement has ensured that there is hardly any division between home and work. The best way to handle this stress is to understand a few simple rules. You have to identify the priority of a certain task and then align this with the manager in terms of expectations and timeline.
There will always be pending work, but one should learn to prioritize. A proper understanding with the manager helps in reducing work pressure. A good team and great colleagues also help, but that depends upon the person’s interpersonal skills. A person with great soft skills often gets help from others in times of need. Another important aspect is good time-management practice—for example, attending only those meetings where one can contribute, and skipping the ones where one can be updated just by reading the minutes. It’s also imperative that you take small breaks as well as go on vacations. But most important is the ability to ‘context-switch’ from home to the workplace, so as to avoid carrying home issues to work arid vice versa. You
have to get deeply immersed in your work at the office, and also get deeply immersed in matters at home. It requires mental discipline to balance work and family life. While it’s up to the individual to exercise this discipline, the company too should see to it that there’s flexibility in work hours; such flexibility often produces better results.
WHAT CAN YOU DO? You have to be in charge of your life. Rather than blame anyone at the workplace or at home, it is your responsibility to balance work and family. You can land in a stressful situation due to one of the following reasons or a combination of them: poor planning, lack of clear priorities; improper time management; indecisiveness; and unclear communication. Of course, you can consult with your manager, mentor or anyone relevant to the situation, but in the end, it is your call on how to act and come out of this mess.
