From Burnout to Balance

I’m a productivity junkie and whenever there are free online courses about the topic, I make sure that I sign up.  Even though, most of the courses take a lot of my time, I feel that they are worth it. I just have to be careful because I tend to only finish the course but do not take the lessons by heart to apply them. For today, I’m sharing the lessons I learned from the eCourse by Kalyn Brooke, From Burnout to Balance: A mindful approach to a more meaningful life.

I like how straightforward this course is.  The goal is simple: what do we do in order not to be burned out?
Kalyn focused on four things we have to be mindful about to ensure that we are living an efficient and meaningful one!

Your Decisions Determine Your Calendar

Change mindset about your schedule. It’s easy to blame other people that makes you adjust your schedule.  However, we have the power to put off things in our calendar. We should be more purposeful of our time. When we are careful of our time, we’ll have more energy to serve other people and we’ll end up happier because we do not worry too much.

It will take practice and a plan to be successful in this strategy.  But the key here is to be conscious on what we put on our calendar. To put it simply: be more intentional with our time.

Say yes to the things that matters most to you and no to the things that don’t.

Questions that can help:

• what commitments are you willing to step back on?
• what boundaries can you put in place so an overloaded calendar is less likely to happen again?

Decision Fatigue is Real

The more you make decisions in a day, the more your decision making deteriorates.

It takes a lot of work to run a home (doing laundry, cleaning home, washing dishes, etc). You need to turn your daily maintenance tasks into a system. Create or implement routines and systems in order to streamline your life at home.

Avoid spinning (attempts to get stuff done but move on to another task without completing prior tasks first).

Questions & ideas that can help:

• what are your biggest frustration areas in your home? choose one to focus on.
• Do one thing/task for two weeks. Complete it before moving on to next thing/task.

Self-Care Feels like a Selfish Luxury but it is a Big Necessity

When self-care is not your priority, it becomes one of the major reasons why you’re burned out. It is necessary to take care of yourself, to take breaks you need and recharge. How can you carve out more time for yourself? Until you take responsibility of your self-care, you won’t get out of the burned out situation.

When you do self-care, you’ll heal yourself from within, you’ll get less stressed and you’ll have better relationships with other people. Schedule a date with yourself. Having no time is not an excuse. You do have the time.  You will find a way to make it happen if self-care is your priority. When you take time for yourself, you’ll feel more refreshed and more content.

Tips that can help:

• brainstorm your favorite self-care ideas
• focus on what will recharge your batteries
• do something for yourself that will make you feel good

Balance is not the Ideal Life Goal, Harmony Is

The most important thing is to understand the true meaning of balance.
If your life is made of different type of boxes, you want each box to be equally filled. You end up putting unrealistic goals for yourself to balance your life.

The truth is balance is not the ideal life goal, harmony is. You choose which boxes to fill, how much of it and when. Your priority will change based on your life season (new job, new parent, new house, etc). If you try to tackle everything equally, you’ll burn out easily. Instead of achieving the impossible, choose core things to focus on. Every week remind yourself of your priorities.

Points to ponder:

• what do you want to be your priority focus right now? where do you need the most support (choose only one)?
  • time management
  • creating systems and routines in your home
  • making time for self-care and exploring different ways to recharge

My biggest takeaway here is about choosing priorities. If you’ve been reading my blog, you’d know that I have tons of goals for 2018.  My mistake for the first three months is that I try to achieve all of them at once. With this course, I was reminded that I should learn to prioritise and allot to work on one-three goals each month. I have a better focus this April. Seems like I’m progressing better than previous months.  We’ll see.