Busy lives often means tight careers and even tighter personal spaces. It’s a tough battle to keep everything on the burners all at once but that’s the standard formula for today’s busy woman – whether she is powering a rewarding career or is an entrepreneur who must put in an insane amount of hours per day.

Still, children must be taken care of, home chores done and family held together through it all. When all is said and done, the one last on the list is the woman of the house.




Recommended ‘me time’
But it doesn’t have to be that way. It is perfectly alright to consider yourself important too. If you are not up mentally, physically and spiritually to meet the challenges of life, then chances are that no one around you, whether family or colleagues will be, either.  Over-worked, depressed and demotivated women (or men) are likely to take wrong decisions, break easily and allow themselves to spiral downward in face of adversity. There is no better individual to be taken care of once in a while than you yourself. But for most women, that’s the hardest thing to do.

Experts recommend that you spend some time on yourself everyday – they call it the ‘me time’ to recharge, regenerate and recover from the daily hum- drum of life. The me time can be spent in prayer or meditation, reading, sitting down, being pampered in a salon or simply sitting down by yourself with a good cup of tea.
The idea is to unwind and give your systems a chance to clear the clutter and calm down. Some companies and organisations encourage the concept of me time where top executives actually get some time off during the week to engage in me time.

Finding the time to spend doing nothing is also considered vital in keeping the work sanity balance. A Saturday afternoon can be set aside for the doing nothing session. Ideally, this portion of time must be totally unplanned and kept for spontaneous activity such as watching a movie, going shopping or just hanging around.






Dying art of conversation
Although we can and often do get into a work mode by default, it is important to keep this part of the week to do nothing on purpose. It can be rewarding once you fit it into a busy week and before long, you begin to enjoy the stress-free half a day that really enables you recuperate from an insanely busy week.

Spending time talking is also a key therapeutic element in achieving the successful work-life matrix. Whether it is the kids, ageing parents, the spouse or colleagues, spending some amount of time connecting is important, especially in today’s highly entertaining environment of social media, smartphones and the Internet. With all those communicative devices, we increasingly find ourselves checking our smartphones while waiting for the bus or our turn at the doctor’s or the supermarket counter.
We no longer make polite small talk that used to turn strangers into friends and acquaintances into colleagues – we can easily be content with our speakers connected to our smartphone playing You Tube videos or music or check Facebook status.

Making conversation is a dying art – I remember reading that following the power outage caused by the infamous storm in New York, a mother discovered that her children actually could not make conversation with other children of the same age when they had nothing to do when their electronic gaming devices and smartphones went out and could not be charged.

In fact, we would do well to realize and discover that those who could make conversation an interesting choice are likely to make new social and business connections easily than others.





Keeping ourselves relevant
Do we spend time recharging, researching and updating ourselves in our chosen field of work? This is an important area – for an example, doctors are expected to update themselves regularly on status of research findings on various relevant illnesses and other heaps of information that flows steadily from on-going research projects.

For professionals and others, updating today is no longer a tedious task given the plethora of information available online at the click of a button. But it is vital that we choose to find the time to update ourselves regularly. Otherwise, we can become like software that is not updated – we lose track of the new developments, the new trends and innovations and thereby, lose the edge in keeping ourselves relevant.  We should find the time to challenge ourselves by never giving up on thinking new ideas and concepts. There is something fundamentally powerful about innovative ideas whose time has come. If not for brilliant ideas, half of the most successful products and services would not have been created

(Nayomini Weerasooriya, a senior journalist, writer and a PR professional, can be contacted at [email protected])