In trying to achieve a healthy life-work balance, many people seem to believe that they can only do this on their own. They think that they have to make personal changes to how they run their lives and how they divide their time between work-related activities and pleasure activities. The concept of having to achieve life-work balance on your own is terribly ironic, because one of the major goals in trying to achieve this balance in the first place is so that you can spend more time with your friends and family.
Human beings are social animals. Even if you make your living online, working alone in front of a computer for most hours of the day, you still need the real world and you still need human interaction. In this way, there is nothing wrong with enlisting the help of your loved ones to keep you in check. Trying to find complete balance in your life can be a very heavy burden and it’s not one that you need to tackle on your own.
Freelance writers and other online entrepreneurs can work anywhere they have an Internet connection and they can work at just about any hour of the day. While this appears to provide a certain level of freedom, it also provides for a very slippery slope toward suffering from burnout. You don’t want to burn out.
Myself, I’m glad that I have a significant other to keep me in check. She’s there to spur me on when I don’t feel particularly motivated to work. At the same time, she’s also there to remind me that it’s perfectly acceptable to take well-deserved breaks. She tells me that I can choose not to work on evening and weekends. If it wasn’t for her, my freelance business would not be where it is today and I wouldn’t be nearly as balanced (scary thought). John Chow echoes this sentiment with his Internet success.
You don’t have to choose between success and happiness. And you don’t have to go it alone either. Who keeps you balanced? Who keeps you in check?
“Behind every successful man is a woman, behind her is his wife.” LOL!!
Behind an average joe like myself is a capable wife, who helps maintain my sanity in this crazy little world.
I keep myself in check. Well… That’s not the whole story because my friends and family give me support.
But what I mean is that “inner peace” or mental sanity are acomplished “by you with others”. 🙂
Ok, so actually I’m a little insane.
My wife absolutely keeps me in check, although it is mostly on the side of reminding me when I need to scale back on the working. I tend to be a workaholic and she is there to provide the reminders when I am starting to lean too far on the work side of things.