Being successful in any field means establishing a healthy work-life balance. You can’t be a workaholic and ignore your friends and family. On the other hand, you also cannot expect to earn a living while enjoying the party life 24/7. For many people, getting the right work-life balance seems impossible.
With young lawyers, hearing the phrase “work-life balance” seems like an encouragement to work less. This couldn’t be farther from the truth. Getting a good work life balance means getting your personal life and your work life to have an equal amount of time and effort spent. Others consider the idea of work-life balance to be boring. Who wants to achieve work-life balance when you could simply focus on life’s priorities instead? The fact is that real work-life balance involves prioritizing things.
The fact is that you can only get a good work-life balance by deciding your priorities. No one has time for everything, but by tackling the big things first, you can make time for the smaller things easier.
In a young lawyer’s world, there are several major priorities that need to be taken care of. Billable work, which will take up 2000 hours of every year, is one of them. Getting good cases and furthering your career is another major priority for most lawyers, regardless of age. However, there are some priorities that need to be remembered, even if they don’t involve a bigger paycheck.
For instance, if you are thinking about getting married and having a family, that’s a major priority that needs to be addressed. Young lawyers who want to buy a house need to make that a priority. Everyone has priorities outside of their work life, and it’s crucial to put as much focus on them as much as the priorities that deal with your career.
There is nothing worse than looking back at life and realizing that you missed out on things that were supposed to be a priority. Many accomplished professionals have toiled their life away in the name of their careers only to realize that they have neglected their families decades later. Others have loving families, but end up penniless and unhirable due to a poor work ethic. Does this really sound like the life that you want to lead? If not, you need to work on a work-life balance.
Attaining a work-life balance is different for everyone. Some people will be perfectly content working 10 hour shifts at a job and then hitting the club for a night out. Others want to work less, but want to head home and spend time with the family. Everyone has a different work-life balance that works best for them. This is because everyone has different priorities. There is no “one size fits all” to life.
Tips on Getting A Work-Life Balance
- As a general rule, starting the path to a good work-life balance includes having some break time for yourself. Spend at least one day a week with your family, friends, or going out and doing what you love.
- When you are feeling sluggish and lethargic, you’re actually very low on energy. You don’t need to go out on the town when this happens; you need a nap or a spa trip. Know when you are too tired to do anything. Don’t try to work when you are too tired, or the quality of the work will end up being degraded.
- Increase the quality, not the quantity of your activities. Don’t focus on doing a lot. Instead, focus on enjoying what you do, and doing the best job you can at it. Think about how much more you can enjoy life if you focus on the things that matter to you. It makes sense to live life that way instead of focusing on doing a bunch of unenjoyable tasks.
- Lastly, keep work and life separate. When work starts seeping into your life, or life starts to seep into your work, the results can be devastating. Stress from work should stay at work, and vice versa. Otherwise, you can expect a double dose of stress, 24/7. Worse, replacing leisure time with more work time can actually cause you to burn out. This is the worst thing that can happen before a major court case.
