We have always been taught, “Work is worship”, while I don’t deny this saying but I think we take it too seriously sometimes. While it’s good to be dedicated to our work, it’s also important to understand that work is just a part of our life and not our life. The more we stress on this the better it is! 

Everybody, including myself, are caught up in due dates and submissions not only in office but also outside those concrete walls that we forget that we have certain responsibilities towards ourselves and our family and they should not be fulfilled at the cost of our physical and mental health!

Has it ever happened with you that you were so stressed during your office hours and while leaving the office, you reach home physically but mentally you are still at the and your subconscious haunts you at night regarding all the pending tasks?

So, what’s the solution for this?

We often hear people stressing on “lack of work-life balance” and honestly I think how hard we all may try, we will never get a perfect work life balance but I think managing work life balance is an art!

As all other artforms, this is also something not everybody can be good at but still we all can try to make some progress in it.

We workaholics, wait for the weekends and hate the guts of Monday! As good as it is being a workaholic, the best way to deal with being overworked can be just a simple exercise, which I try to follow every day.

Whenever I close the office door behind me, I mentally make sure to say goodbye to the office for the day and not think about work and the pending tasks until the next day till I enter that door again!

Well, it’s not that simple as it sounds! But what if we can follow this, just think as if we have two lives, one which is for work, which is alive inside those 4 walls and the one which is outside those walls! It’s like, ‘when the soul leaves our body, we die!’ I know it might sound a bit dramatic, but honestly I think it’s better to think of it that way!

The next important step is to remove our attention from work and divert our mind into the activities which we like. There is no specific time or day to love what we do, apart from work!

We are so busy cribbing about our work life balance that we hardly focus on our hobbies.
Remember that painting which you left incomplete, that show which you wanted to binge watch but couldn’t, that bicycle ride which you planned months ago, that write-up which is still incomplete, that book which you wanted to read! this list goes on and on! 

We all have so many incomplete tasks or hobbies which we couldn’t complete due to such reasons. Tell yourself, now is the time to catch up with yourself, with your hobbies, with the things you actually love doing!

The best way to switch off from work is to do what you love! It doesn’t matter if you can’t give 3-4  hours to it or can do it at a stretch. If you can give even half an hour a day to do what you love, you have seized your day and its already better than spending that half an hour cribbing about what is bad in the life. 

No matter what’s happening in your work life, just that half an hour a day for yourself and your hobbies can make a major difference in the way we look at the life!

This “me time” of should be exclusively for you and for what you like, it may not fit the expectations of others but again, not everything is to be validated by others, it should be validated by you !

Another add-on should be spending time with your family. Trust me, everything is temporary, so spending time with your loved ones is the utmost important thing ! Just sit with them and talk, that’s it ! That’s what is needed, nothing more, nothing less !

So, this is the art of switching off from work. It might not seem easy at first, and honestly we can’t follow it everyday too, but if we make a habit, we could really make a difference ! “Rome was not built in a day”, so yes this is not going to happen in a day, it’ll take time !

For everyone who has watched “Kota factory” , to quote Jeetu Bhaiya, to turn something into a habit, it takes 21 days ! So I think what’s crucial is to make it a Habit, that whatever happens, you might be too stressed sometimes from achieving your “work life balance”, half an hour each day ! And trust me, it’ll make a difference !