Singapore is a bustling city. It’s also home to some of the world’s successful individuals. That is if the definition of success would be limited to financial prosperity. To be truly successful, there must be a balance between your professional and personal life. Is work life balance in Singapore possible? It is! And below are some tips to achieve it.
Focus On Activities That Matter
Are you familiar with the book The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferris? The central thesis of the book is that we can reduce the number of hours we spend working in a given week if we will only focus on the activities that matter. Not everyone will be able to reduce their workweek into just four hours – at least not instantly. But anyone can eliminate time-wasting activities that don’t provide anything worthwhile in our lives. The problem with many people is that they don’t prioritize the activities that provide the most significant returns in their lives.
To be able to determine the activities of the most important events in your daily schedule, you must first find out what it is really that you want out of life. Many people want to have freedom, good health, and happiness but are they focusing on activities that bring them closer to the things they aspire to have. When people don’t contemplate and take an audit of their values, they get sucked into doing something just for the sake of doing them, only to be busy but not necessarily productive. This is why many people feel that there is no work-life balance in their lives.
So, in short, you need to work smarter and not harder. In Singapore, it’s easy to be sucked into the lifestyle of working a crazy number of hours every week just because everybody seems to be doing it. So you should ask yourself: Why am I going with the flow?
Simplify Your Life
You’ve probably heard of people who’ve decided to lead a minimalist lifestyle. This means that they have to give up a lot if not most of their property. Some have even said that they can now fit all of their belongings in a single backpack. The most astounding thing about these people is that most of them are generally happier now that they have less. Maybe it’s too extreme for you to give life with a backpack full of belongings. But for sure, you can do something today that can significantly simplify your life. But yes, you still need to let go of some of the things in your life.
You should start with your closet. How many clothes in your closet do you wear? Sometimes we buy stuff such as clothes because we think that having more stuff will make you happy. Now you can ask yourself: Am I working just to be able to buy stuff that I think would make me happy? Maybe I can spend less time working and more time pursuing things that matter, endeavors that can make me happy? You will come to realize that the imbalance in your life is caused by wrongly identifying the cause of your happiness. The most satisfied people in the world are those who lead simple lives. Maybe you should learn from them.
Avoid Distractions
People who believe that they can’t achieve a work-life balance are those that often complain that they don’t have enough time. But a closer analysis of their daily activities will reveal that it’s not a lack of time that is the problem. Often, the problem is that they allow themselves to be distracted by activities that don’t matter. They find it hard to finish a project because they get sidetracked by little things such as an email, a social media post, the latest series on Netflix. If they counted the time they spend every day on these activities, they would be surprised at how much time they are wasting.
To achieve more work-life balance, you need to identify the time wasters and distractions in your life. And then you need to make an effort to avoid them. But honesty is required here. You need to learn how to stop making excuses if you want to make lasting changes in your life.
