Day 2: Put Work Away!

For my first real post for 31 days; I decided to start off with work. I know, not ultimately that exciting, but I figured that seeing as work is unavoidable it would be a good place to start.

I find that a lot of my daily stress revolves around work because I sort of work at a job, and also at home. I work at a part-time job to pay bills, and then I also am working towards creating a Handmade Soap Business. I'm hoping that if I can cut down on my work related stress I can actually get closer to my goal of working from home.

How will cutting down on stress help me start my business? For a while I was pretty sure (subconsciously) that it wouldn't! I thought if I was busy and really stressed, then I must be pretty productive! The only problem was that I would get defensive about my free time, and would start putting off getting work done for my business because I 'deserved' my free time. Which is all fine and well, accept for the whole time I was 'relaxing' I would keep stacks of whatever it was that I was supposed to be working on so that I would feel guilty remember to get back to it. It was really stressful, and it wasn't enjoyable or productive... aka? Flawed.

I constantly feel like I don't have enough time in a day, and I feel like a lot of people also feel that way, whether they work full time, or own a business, or are a stay at home parent. Truth is? None of us have a lot of time, but we should all have enough time to balance work and life. I think the key is to get work done, and then put it away. It's not doing me any good if I decide that I'm done working, and then it's still staring me in the face.

Some things I'm going to try to do to make work less of a stresser for me:

Get up earlier: Getting to have a proper breakfast and a little bit of downtime before the work day really starts is worth the 30 minutes to an hour of sleep I would be losing.

Prioritize: I'm going to work on anything I want to get done earlier in the day, as opposed to leaving it for later. Even if it's nice to relax in the morning, you'll only be thinking about work!

Focus! : I'm going to keep my computer, cell phone, and tv off and away from me while I'm working so I can have a productive couple hours and then stop!

Put Work Away: When you come home from work, or decide that you are done for the day, really stop. Don't keep thinking about it, or working on it sort-of while you watch youtube or check emails, really let yourself stop working.

I really think that if I try to make a habit of doing all that, that I'll be less stressed and more productive.

Is this something that you struggle with too? Let me know if these tips have helped you out at all, or what you do to balance work and life.

Thanks for Reading!