Datasheet

Part I: Preparing for Personal Productivity

“If I Only Had a Life . . .”

One surefire way to tell that your personal life and work aren’t in balance is if

you don’t even think of yourself as really having a personal life. If your work

not only takes center stage in your life but leaves little or no room for anyone

or anything else, then I think you’d agree that you’re in real need of regaining

some kind of balance between your office and home. Another clear sign is if

you always feel as though both at work and at home you don’t have enough

time to get all you have to do done, and therefore are decidedly dissatisfied

in both environments.

In this age of the knowledge/service worker outfitted with anywhere, anytime

Internet access, it can be especially hard to maintain even the smallest semblance

of work/life balance.

As someone who’s made a living as a self-employed author working principally

in a home office setting, I encountered my first major problem with maintaining

any real personal life early on in my writing career. It first showed up in the

form of extended workdays that were all too soon joined by working weekends.

And the moment I got my first laptop computer and realized that my writing

could now accompany me on holiday, working vacations immediately took their

unrighteous place beside my working weekends and interminable workdays.

And although this unholy alliance may have contributed to my meeting many

a book deadline, this came at a high cost to maintaining equilibrium between

my professional and personal lives both in terms of personal stress and lost

opportunities to unwind from the demands of the job.

Checking out some typical warning

signs of work/life imbalance

You may be wondering whether you’re really suffering from work/life imbalance

or whether the job you currently have is simply a really bad fit. To help you

determine whether you should start applying the principles in this book instead

of doing an extensive job search online, I’ve put together the following checklist.

This checklist contains the most common warning signs of the productivity

problems that can lead to significant work/life imbalance. If you find that

several items in this list apply in your situation, in all probability you need

to start implementing steps to regain a sense of equilibrium between your

personal and professional life:

 You feel as though there’s never enough time in the day to get all your

work done.