Our lives are characterized by things we do whether at home, at work or anywhere else.
Unless you work from home or you don’t work at all, your day can get wasted very easily the moment you pack up your bags and leave the office.
Everything you do whether at home or in the office will have an effect on the trajectory of your happiness and productivity. What this means is that even your career could really suck if you only give serious concern to what you do in your workplace and care less about how you spend your time after it is closing time.
your relationships, your health, your career and everything that means anything to you depends on how well you utilize the entire 24 hours, and since we have mostly got the working hours covered, here are a few tips on how to better utilize your time after work.
1. Let closing hours be closing hours
Taking your work seriously shouldn’t prevent you from having a life.
Surely there are times when you would have too much work on your desk that couldn’t get done within the normal working even if you give it all your attention. Such situations might warrant you to spend more than you should at work, and then it happens again a week later, another week later, a few days later, and so the cycle begins.
You’d think there’s a pretty justifiable reason to stay at work more than you should, all the time, but there isn’t.
Don’t get me wrong I am all for getting things completed, but I also support John Wooden when he says “Don’t let making a living prevent you from making a life”.
There’s an obvious fix to your problem rather than extending your office time. Take your work home.
There’s no rule that prevents you from taking your work as long as you don’t spend more time than necessary on it.
Create a nice little working space, somewhere devoid of distractions. Very good internet connection is also key so you’d want a router that can offer you a great Wi-Fi connection with higher speeds and an excellent Wi-Fi range like those on LabAgile.
Doing this might not be the ideal thing to do but it’s a decent fix for being stuck at work all the time.
2. Plan ahead of time
Our lives will be a lot better if only we would do the needful and plan for ahead of time.
A lot of persons tend to plan only for what activities they would do at work and they ignore the huge chunk of time after that.
Planning how you would spend that time after work is just as important (if not more important) as the time you spend in the office. In fact, if you want to be more productive in work the next day then you must give great consideration to the things you do during those times that precedes office time.
You can do this only if you think ahead of time and take some minutes to organize the days ahead.
3. Forego some things
If you want to get things done and well then you shouldn’t expect to do everything that comes your way.
Saying NO is sometimes the best thing you can do for yourself.
Chances are that you are mostly exhausted whenever you get back from work and merely knowing that you have tons of stuff to take care of after that a long day in the office could leave you mentally frustrated.
Take a mental note of all the things that you are required to do and arrange them in order of priority. Give attention to the most important ones and let go of the not so pressing ones.
4. Set a period to ignore social media
Surely after work, you’d need to cool off, catch up with friends and loves ones, and nothing says catching up better than connecting on social media, but we tend to get carried away a lot of times.
A little time on social media is recommended but if you don’t want to end up spending your time on irrelevant things that seem appealing, then you should limit the time you spend on it.
Unless your work requires you to market yourself or business through these platforms, a few minutes a day is enough for you to connect with loved ones and catch up on the happenings around you.