Before COVID-19 pandemic, people did not tend to analyze in detail the issue of healthy work-life balance, nevertheless, several lockdowns emphasized the significance of this aspect of personal lives of employees. Regular overstrain, exhaustion during long hours in the workplace, and reduced communication with loved ones undermine the mental health of all people without any racial, status, or gender differences.
For many employees, achieving an equal balance between work and personal life seems like a very difficult challenge, however, if you are an ADU owner, then everything is simplified.
The accessory dwelling unit can bring plenty of advantages, but it is providing a unique chance to create harmony even in cases when besides the work and personal life you have some extra conditions, e.g., the appearance of a new baby or the relocation of age-related family members.
In this review, we will reveal to you what the hidden advantages of this concept are, how the ADU space will assist you in achieving work-life balance, and how to turn this process into pleasure.
We can start to give countless examples of creating work-life balance, nevertheless, the initial stage is the understanding of what is the rational grain of the separation of these two spheres of life. Firstly, if you maintain boundaries, then you are guaranteed to remain at a very high productive level, because endless work hours without breaks and rest will quickly lead to emotional burnout. Secondly, a perfectly debugged work-life balance has a positive effect on psychological health, and therefore on the functioning of all immune systems, because the bottom of all diseases are shattered nerves.
Finally, if you balance work and personal life, you will enjoy every day, because workaholics note that everything important passes them by, including such moments as communication with family or friends. Healthy work-life balance will permit you to live every moment fully and with pleasure.
In compliance with many management practitioners and theorists, prosperous optimization of job time is the perfect start in gaining success. There are many practices from extremely unusual such as Eisenhower Matrix or Parkinson's Law to quite traditional, e.g., creation of task lists. However, here we want to focus on the ADU organization, which is based on the principles of time management for the perfect work-life balance.
Surely each of us is familiar with the situation when you receive a task and cannot move forward after 30 minutes of work, or even after 12 hours. Trying to fulfill one task without stopping can disrupt work-life balance and lead to huge stress, so we recommend setting limits on job performance, and then changing focus, so you will have more hours to spend with your family in your ADU.
Concentration plays an essential role in effective work, however, in the process of designing ADU, many homeowners saturate the living space with a variety of decorative elements that can destroy focus. In this regard, remove from your workspace, e.g., home office, everything that can distract your attention.
All people who have encountered diets know that the main clue to losing weight lies in fractional nutrition, the same rule applies to making the perfect work-life balance. Divide your eight hours working day into segments, and between them engage yourself in different actions, e.g., listen to music while lying on your sofa, read a blog on your favorite topic, or breathe fresh air in outdoor living space. This tactic will help you work flexible hours, however, the most crucial point here is not to stretch breaks too long.
For many years, workers have believed that multitasking is one of the coolest skills, however, no one notes that multitasking is often strongly associated with the poor quality of the completed job and also leads to deterioration of psychological well-being and rapid burnout. For this reason, do not try to do a project in parallel with family responsibilities or any other household tasks, because this will disrupt work-life balance.
We turn back to where we started. If you are stuck on a work task, then communication with your family can help you with this. Take a break and just talk to your wife, husband, children, or elderly parent, if he lives in your ADU, because there is a big chance that during the dialogue, you will find a thought that will give you the ability to find the key to the task.
Overall, all these methods of organizing time management in a general sense have a very positive effect on work-life balance, and in particular, their application will help you to properly allocate working hours, gain greater focus, achieve success at work and, on par with this, save time for family.
Stress is a phenomenon that accompanies an adult for most of his life. Stress can appear as a result of psychological trauma, illness of a family member, constant conflicts with friends and, in principle, the older we get, the more resources for stress appear in our personal lives. However, the most common cause of chronic stress is work life imbalance, and COVID-19 pandemic became a confirmation of this suggestion, when people were unable to attend social events, were left alone with remote work and worsened their mentality.
Fortunately, you can avoid the stress caused by a disturbed work-life balance, especially if you live in ADU:
On scientific forums, you can find countless articles about the fact that the cause of stress is very often a lack of oxygen in the office, which leads to a depressed state. In your free time from work, do not neglect outdoor living space, which you can equip with a hammock or swing.
Equip a place in your ADU where you can practice yoga with relaxing music for only 20 minutes a day. Among all wellness programs, this method is the most effective.
The standard gray office designs and long hours in them, like a press, can put pressure on the psyche. On par with this, a customized home office is one of the basic components of an ideal work environment for great performance.
Some will call this aspect questionable in achieving a healthy work-life balance, but cooking in a cozy kitchen in ADU is a powerful antistress. Firstly, during the cooking process, you communicate and exchange positive emotions. Secondly, the natural smells of delicious dishes stimulate the part of the brain that is responsible for happiness. And what is the most likely scenario in the workplace? You eat alone, fast, and without gastronomical pleasure.
Everyone knows that for good performance at work, you need to rest. However, not everyone has an intention to use valuable free hours of personal life on ordinary sleep or watching TV shows, and in this case there is no better option than doing a hobby in ADU. You can organize any space, be it a clay workshop or a room for art, an area for figure cutting on wood or modeling. Doing a hobby with your favorite music in a cozy ADU will relieve you of stress and form a basis for a good work-life balance.
We cannot say that these techniques for coping with stress are very difficult to implement, on the contrary, they will not only eliminate emotional exhaustion and boost mental health, but also bring pure pleasure.
The growth of employees who started working from home in the last decade is calculated exponentially. This phenomenon is becoming the cause of new challenges, because the home environment is radically different from the office. Despite all the amenities in your main home or ADU, a permanent stay within four walls can have an extremely negative impact on both productivity and the psyche, especially in the long term. In this regard, at the very first stage of your remote work, it is necessary to pay increased attention to healthy work-life balance and control it.
There are millions of ways from a special ADU organization to sports, and we will not ignore these aspects in the following parts of our ultimate guide.
It's time to touch the most creative component in maintaining work-life balance, namely, the creation of a customized home office. In everyday life, employees of various companies agree that even minimal changes in office space can increase productivity, so large corporations are constantly working on the design of offices.
ADU is a fully customized space, the final appearance of which can embody all the ideas, among which stand out:
In sum, in a few days you will note how work performance has improved and most importantly your mood has lifted, because the ideal starting point just lies in such things as positive vibes in the atmosphere around you.
Both work and personal life are inextricably linked with communication, however, the second component have a greater impact on the creation of work-life balance. It is always essential to get an opinion from the outside, because it provides an opportunity to objectively assess the situation. Keeping in mind the concept of work-life balance, we recommend contacting your family members, because they can give you valuable advice on the allocation of working hours, so that you don't get bogged down in work and only in work. Of course, in many instances, the head of the firm dictates the rules for employees, but if you work remotely from your technological ADU, then communication with your closest people on this issue will be very valuable.
We found out that splitting the working day into small segments contributes to gaining work-life balance. However, there is one more point that can radically change the situation and permit you to reach harmony in the work calendar.
It's about personal health care and sports that fit perfectly into the ADU space:
Mental well-being is one of the foundations of work-life balance, however, physical health also plays an equally important role. If you do not control your physical condition, then it will have a negative impact on everything from performance at work to overall life satisfaction. And if you are aware that physical health is the basis of everything, then the vigor of body and spirit will allow you to perfectly balance between work and personal life.
History knows thousands of people who took on all available responsibilities, which very often led to a rapid destruction of all life, loss of friends and business. Therefore, we recommend you to think about the practices of delegating responsibilities because this technique provides a unique opportunity to harmoniously maneuver between work duties and other personal matters. Tasks prioritizing can manifest itself both at work and at home. In practice, it looks like that instead of doing everything yourself, you can distribute responsibilities among colleagues and simply monitor the progress of their implementation.
If you work in online mode, then, as in the case of parental leave, share responsibilities among all family members so that no one experiences excessive workload.
Some people may think that the task of gaining work-life balance implies a specific rejection of some actions in favor of others, but this is not so, because work-life balance is about flexibility. For this reason, it is advisable to balance work and personal life in ADU, since this living space is also flexible. You may ask, what is the flexibility? We will answer that in the modern world changes regularly occur, and they can disrupt work-life balance to such an extent that you will feel overwhelmed and lose control of the situation, but if you try new practices, including those we described above, adequately evaluate your capabilities, seek help from your family, equip your ADU by new needs and challenges, then no difficulty will be able to disrupt your work-life balance.
We came to the outcome that flexibility is a great quality in maintaining work-life balance, and we can claim the same about adaptability. This ability to find effective solutions in a rapidly changing environment can manifest itself through different skills. Some you already know about, e.g., delegating responsibilities, and others like being more open to innovation or the capacity to work under pressure, you may still have to train. However, we cannot imagine adaptability without the support of friends, colleagues, and family whose members live with you in ADU. You can always discuss pressing problems over a cup of hot coffee and a sandwich, and even a short dialogue has every chance of becoming key, because solutions that can create an ideal work-life balance appear completely suddenly, but they will bring harmony into your life.
ADU is the perfect space to separate work and personal life. Initially, you can make ideal conditions for more efficient performance, which will not take up all the time. Secondly, you can arrange a space for additional activities, so as not to feel overwhelmed. Finally, ADU will permit you to create a work culture without unnecessary stress, which negatively affects physical and mental health.
You can arrange each room in your ADU to support the level of your work-life balance at the desired threshold. You can build a home gym to stay active and maintain the immune system, you can spend time outdoors with kids and pets in the outdoor living space, you can customize the workplace to boost the inspiration and engage in hobbies to distract from work.
Societal attitudes in relation to work-life balance have drastically changed over the past decade, and now it is obvious that if you manage to separate work and personal life, it will bring plenty of privileges. In particular, you can perform a greater productivity, gain the capability to screen your health, communicate more with your family and burn out less from the work routine.
