In this day and age, it can be difficult to keep your work life and personal life completely separate. People are spending more and more time working, which can either have a positive or negative impact on their lives. Either way, it’s important to ensure your work life stress doesn’t impact your personal life. This article has a few tips and tricks to figure out if your work life is impacting your personal life and what to do about work stress.

Is your job impacting your personal life?

While your job may very well affect your life in a positive way, here are a few ways to tell if your work is impacting your life negatively:

• It takes time away from what’s important. If you often find yourself canceling date night and missing your children’s activities, your job is most definitely impacting your life negatively. It’s crucial to take a step back and figure out what is truly important to you in your life.
• It’s adding stress. Do you feel stressed, even after you leave work? For some people, leaving work at work can be difficult and it can cause them to snap at others or feel down without even realizing it’s because of their work stress.
• It’s holding you back from living your dreams. If you spend years of your life at a dead end job, hoping it’ll somehow lead you to your dream job, then you’re going to waste the best years of your life. It’s important evaluate your current position and consider how it can help you get to where you truly want to be.

Maintaining a healthy work-life balance

While it may seem impossible to work, have a social life, take care of your family, and manage to eat enough vegetables each week, it is possible. Here are a few things you can be doing each week to help you work towards that balance:

• Manage your time better. It may seem like an obvious thing to do, but time management is something people always struggle with. It’s important to sit down every week and figure out what needs to be done and prioritize your tasks. Seemingly small work tasks can end up taking much more time than expected. In fact, something as simple as emailing can take up to 28% of your time in a workweek. You need to make a schedule and stick to it to avoid putting other important tasks, like family dinners, on the back burner.
• Along with managing your time better, it’s just as important to make sure you take time to focus on yourself. If you happen to have a free night, don’t feel the need to schedule something in. It’s important to remember to do the things that make you happy, even if you have limited time.
• Make the most of your time off. It can be tempting to lay in bed all weekend and then regret is come Sunday night when you realize you wasted the whole weekend. While it’s a good time to catch up on laundry and dishes, it’s also a good time to go outside and experience things you don’t get to during the week.

While work-life balance may seem like a daunting and impossible task, with a few small adjustments to your life, it is possible. Your job shouldn’t be taking over your entire life and you shouldn’t have to sacrifice your mental well-being for a job you don’t even like. Once you get your priorities straight, managing your work and personal lives will come naturally.