“It is your family which is your security net. You only require peace when you are sleeping, for which balance in life is needed at the most. It is something that is missing these days from the lives of people.” Rajeev Karwal shares his insight to help people manage their lives in better way.
Taru Bhatia
“If you can take work to home, why not taking home to work” these are the lines said by the person who has denoted two decades of his life to work, which is still continuing. Rajeev Karwal, who is known for his strategic abilities and excellent execution, who has also served as the CEO of various leading brands in India like Onida, LG, Electrolux etc, doled out his views on how one can bring balance between professional and personal life. He maintains that today people are so involved in rat race that it keeps their stress level at high, resulting chaos in personal life. It might be a story of almost everyone who revolves around the uneven chord between two lives. “In India people are assuming themselves as machine and yearning for success at every moment, suffocating the ways for moral values. I believe that the kind of behavior is leading people towards traumatic situations. For me relationships matters the most in life. It is really important to balance out relationships with uttermost care, as you need someone to celebrate your success with at last. Sitting at a drinking bench is not considered as happiness; it is only an easy escape from the reality of life.”
Today if someone is very passionate about work and has moved up to the mark of hierarchy, the demands of work for them are tremendous. Consequently, the number of hours one spends over the work also increases, as well as travelling one do for work. The phone calls and the data-based smart phones and tablets etc can make you reachable anywhere at any time. For someone carries work on his shoulders feels that there is a need to reply immediately, so this reflects a compromise over breakfast, lunch, even refreshing out., in the mid of all this what usually happen is a person could not pay suffice attention to its personal life. “What I personally feel is that in our daily routine work, we do not segregate the work properly, for which a lot of discipline is required at foremost. One thing we all need to remember is that an achiever, someone who is having aims in life, has to uphold priorities. If a person determines to maintain work with personal life, for which work needs to be restarted after the family sleeps or before it wakes up, so be it.”
Finding the nerve for the imbalance
There are many reasons as he described which are making it hard to find stability in life when it comes to deal with family over work. Moreover, he believes that with the changing lifestyle one is not able to find tranquility within one’s mind, which generates negative emotions such as anger, frustration, irritation etc.
At the beginning he mentioned that there is no such thing as multi-tasking. It is mostly misunderstood by many, like if am talking to somebody at a moment and doing other things simultaneously. In that way I can say that either I am not listening to that person or not paying full attention to the other work, and so justice is not given to either of them. Hence, the time one has taken to complete that particular task has also increased, because two tasks are being executed at the same time. On the other hand, if that same work is divided accordingly with time, then it will definitely get easy to finish work at time as well as correctly. If you are doing something stick on it, finish it and then move on to something other, so later you don’t have to spend extra time on the work that you have left incomplete.
Secondly, he said that some people today believe to respond immediately to the emails they receive, which is actually inefficient to do, because it is interfering with a lot of other things you are performing at present. To act sensibly is possible only when one fixes time slots for various jobs. For example checking emails after every two hours, because nothing is more important than the work you are doing at present, or if something is urgent people will call you again. Sometimes it happens when people just call you to pass the buck of their work on you, so it will be an important learning for them too.
Last, but not the least, he stressed that people, amid major work-load and expectations, are driving themselves to an impulsive personality, which gives rise to anger. When things don’t go the way it has been assumed by people, their mind gets rigid and unacceptable to the circumstances. It is to be understood that things may go out of your control at home or at your office. Getting annoyed and absorbing stress in life could not help the situation go better.
A piece of advice
First of all learn to segregate your daily work. The burden of your work will never reduce if it is not managed properly. An organized schedule can help you to take out extra hours for your own activities. It will somehow calm your tensed mind. For this you need to prepare a priority list for yourself, which will include the work that is needed to be done today, and cannot be left for tomorrow. As every work has its own priority like high, medium and low, it differs with the situation. Besides the work, make sure in that list spending time with family is also included.
Second, do not keep a belief that everything has to be done today. Take set of tasks for a day and do not overburden it by loading it with extra work. As it will ultimately cause stress in mind and with that nothing could be done properly. What people usually do is they take up minor tasks and keep postponing the lengthy one. Well, certainly tension will simmer when later you will get run out of time. So try always to kill the ugly frog first and be optimistic for the upcoming tasks that can be handled next day.
Thirdly, don’t get jammed with failures, have faith over your strengths. Life does not get finish over one mistake you do. Success occurs when you take up your failures and move ahead with confidence. Difficult times are inevitable in life but not permanent. Do not always look at the dark side of you as every person has strengths that rise above failures.
At last, do not crowd your family hours with work as they might yearn to spend quality time with you. People may feel weird about it but it is always better to do these things that give you inner satisfaction, even if that comes with your family. Spending good time with family and caring for their needs help one to be grounded in life.
Having a good family support and being honest towards your work are the two main aspects for which one requires to build harmony between two lives. Rajeev believes that maintain balance in life is something that is controlled by outlining your mind with discipline. If you keep aims then do not get distracted with what others do and compromise with your stress by starting each day with a fresh thought and promising yourself that you won’t repeat the previous mistakes anymore.