By Lila Ojha
Reviewed by Tabu Butagira
When people engage in work for different purposes, they always have some kind of difficulties to balance between work and personal life.
From my personal experience, when I started to work outside home, I had to make sure I fulfilled both my family and other social responsibilities.
Being a mother of two, I always had difficulty to work within the time frame. For that reason I was not able to continue with my first job as an assistant at a media outlet, and left it. However, I still wanted a paid job outside home. As such, I decided to utilize my leisure time to take training to gain additional skills.
When my kids were of age, I enrolled them at a childcare center to free me up for salaried employment. It was not easy leaving my lovely toddlers at the Montessori School. As a result, my mind while at work remained preoccupied with the safety, health and welfare of my babies while in the care of a stranger. I realized that emotional and work satisfaction are totally different. It was ironic that I had a job, but suddenly couldn’t give fuller meaning of love to the very children I so much love. So, that feelings really drove me to question my work/life balance.
To me, work/life balance means managing personal interest, family and friends and everyday work.Thus we are more productive when we combine our jobs with our personal interests. This will automatically increase our energy level and help to maintain the rest of our relations.
My earlier interest was to be a radio anchor and I was on the right path to fulfill my desire. That motivated me to maintain family life and personal life.
We can’t escape from our family and social life. So if we make sure our responsibility to help our family and society even on small scale, that give us more energy and satisfaction at our work.
To me, as a media person, I usually don’t have time to spend with family and friends, although they are not complaining about that. I guess the reason maybe I often spend breakfast and dinner time with family and, at least once or twice a month, I spend time eating out with family. And I often share details of work schedule with them.This has helped me to keep my family understanding of my work, settled and together.
Equally, I have some like-minded friends and relatives. I always make sure to call them at least once or twice a month and share and up date each other about activities and ideas. Similarly, I attend neighborhood invitations as whenever possible, which may seems not so important, but it helps me to be social and it’s fun outside of work.
I have also read articles about work/ life balance. I got similar and some different definitions about it. Although the conclusion was almost same: That as a human beings, we need to find a middle ground and means to be a part of society within our busy work life.
