Improve Your Self-Awareness to Have Better Work-Life Integration

Aiming for work-life integration means you’re weaving the two parts of your life together, so you can live in harmony with yourself. Sounds great, right? But how do you do it? Before doing anything drastic, make sure you clearly understand what your priorities are, without the influence of others. Once you’ve identified your top priorities, you’re ready to do the hard work. To find—and improve—your version of work-life integration, there are three key concepts you may want to consider.

Here are the three tangible ideas and strategies that can help you improve your self-awareness in order to blend two parts of your life together better:

1. Prioritization Is Self

For Coach Sinto Llobera, any priority means you should be choosing yourself first. Not in a selfish way, but understanding who you are, what you need, where your boundaries are, and where you want to spend your energy. Some days that means spending more time on work projects, while other days that means giving more time to your family. Or you could bring your work life and your personal life together in different ways. For example, maybe you spend time prepping for dinner while listening to an all-company webinar. By keeping boundaries around our work and our personal priorities, it can be easier to know how to bring them together in a smoother way.

Building your inner peace by “living from the inside out” means you’re more able to see what activities should receive your time and energy. You have a better understanding of where your focus and boundaries should be each day, and how you can blend various parts of your life together in an effective and meaningful manner.

2. Continued Self-awareness

To be able to prioritize yourself and make decisions from your highest self, you need to continue to develop your self-awareness. Coach Amanda Crooks believes working to fully understand your personal values gives you the awareness and ability to clearly see your priorities. Without practicing self-awareness, we can fall into trying to keep our lives rigidly structured rather than in a flow. For example, if you personally believe being at your kids’ evening sports events is important, then you may need to find work-life integration by leaving your house earlier in the morning, so you can end your work day earlier. You can choose and recognize you’re giving your time to both in a manageable way.

Using your values as the benchmark for your priorities means you’ll develop stronger work-life integration. You’ll be able to see more clearly if you’re spending time on the people and things that are important to you.

3. Eliminate Busy Work

To feel more productive and to have better work-life integration, you need to be able to finish the “must do” tasks each day. Having too much to do can make it tempting to work past your set boundary, eating into the time you have for other things. For Coach Abhishek Mishra, the solution is to eliminate part of your “To Do” list.

Not doing the things that are neither important nor fulfilling means you have more time to do the things you love or are important to you—professionally or personally. Understanding you have a finite amount of time and purposefully choosing how you spend your time is a key way to achieve that sense of work-life harmony. You can freely decide to take a mid-afternoon yoga class knowing you’ll be in a better mood, with a refreshed mindset, enabling you to be more productive for the remainder of the day.

It can be difficult to find your priorities and see where you’re “off-balance” by yourself. Talking with a TaskHuman coach about your concerns, difficulties, and desires can help you get a clear picture of what you want your work-life integration to look like. 

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