In three hours at work, you could get something substantial accomplished and if you fell short, you felt the pain right away. If you spent three hours at home with the family, it felt like you hadn’t done a thing, and if you skipped it – nothing happened. So….you spent more and more time at office, on high-margin, quick yield tasks and even believed that you were staying away from home for the sake of the family. You decided that the initial part of your life, you’d delegate to pushing your career to dizzying heights and at an imaginary future point would be family-time – only to find that by then, the family has all dispersed.

Let’s change the conversation.

While we strive for a work-from-home balance, we are also balancing our mental and emotional intelligence. These are testing times, the world over. As the Earth is recovering from the pandemic, we are venturing into unchartered waters and there are oodles of things to learn afresh. Life’s in a limbo right now, but there’s also a new-found confidence in the ability to learn and adapt on one’s own.

There’s no perfect one-size-fits-all balance, though. We are all different people with different priorities, different lives. Trying to schedule everything perfectly seems unrealistic and robotic. Life is way more fluid than that. And the paradox is that the right balance for you today, is likely to be different tomorrow.

Remember how you often yearned for a time-centred seamless lifestyle? A flexibility to spend your time where, when and how you want to? Think about it – you kind of have it now, albeit by default. Mastering time and space is easy, especially when you’re not confined to an office. The separating line between your work and work-from-home are getting more and more blurred.

Organizations are creating company cultures in which everyone is in touch virtually and there is enough digital engagement happening for employees, more so now that most are at work remotely. One of the secret benefits for companies using remote workforce, is that the work itself becomes the yardstick to judge someone’s performance. No frills. So, make the best of it. Take time to make time to enjoy it.

This is the time to seek out what you love to do most. It’s energizing and refreshing. Manage your mind – when fear, self-doubt or anxiety creep in – meditate, go for a walk, read, exercise. Don’t try to be all things to all people. If you don’t ace accounts – don’t fret, seek help and outsource it. You could try breaking up your time in 4 parts – Urgent and important, Important but not urgent, Urgent but not important, Neither urgent nor important….and sally forth. Know your peaks and troughs. Don’t assign tough, high concentration tasks to trough times. Your client usually wants something done yesterday – time tracking software helps. Invest in it. Plot some personal time. Take a break. Unplug. Do whatever it is that sails your boat. It’s about finding your North Star.

Being stubborn about your goals and flexible about your methods is what you can actually subscribe to now. Making any adverse situation, if at all, work to your benefit is sexy!