Balance

Do you have balance in your life? And by life I mean work and other endeavours during the day. Although it may seem that work takes up most of your productive time.

How many times have you gotten up at the crack of dawn, worked all day, actually late, then come home and just do not have the energy for anything. Not too productive on the personal side, is it?

We work to live, not live to work, or work for the weekends. Our jobs often define us, but is it the real you? Put your all into your job, don't get me wrong, I'm not going to promote working less or not as hard. Do your job to the best of your abilities.

But, find time to pursue happiness. In whatever form that takes.

For those us that are unemployed/searching for work or under-employed, it seems that I still have a full day of 'work' and feel tired at the end of the day. Why is that? Poor health or diet maybe?

Maybe. I haven't been hitting the gym as much lately as I usually do. Now does working out at the gym make me happy? Well, not 'happy' but happier that I'm on a path to bettering my health. I'm often asked if I love working out. No. But that achy feeling or tightness that reminds me that I have been working out, is nice.

First time I was laid off, I got in pretty good shape. I had a great routine for the work week: I hit the gym in the morning, planned a lunch date to continue networking, spent the afternoon job searching and reconnecting, and at night I pursued my real hobby, working in community theatre.

I find mindless working out good, but not really productive. I would go to the gym and do 30-45 minutes of either cardio or weights, but I never seemed to progress. And I certainly wasn't looking any better.

So, I had to get serious about working out. Start tracking my workouts and my eating. I currently have a Blackberry and use it as my MP3 player while working out (I can also check on work emails at the same time). So I needed something to build and track my workouts with. I finally landed on a great (Canadian built) site called GymTechnik. You can use it on your computer or on your mobile device. They have made some great updates and I find it very good.

So by putting some effort into planning workouts, I could start to see the changes and feel them. But one cannot stay in the gym all day. Got to put some time into the job search.

I would often found that if I tried to meet more than one person a day, such as have a lunch and a coffee in one day, I was overloaded! It's amazing how busy you can be when job searching. How do we ever manage full-time jobs, family, friends and fun?

Balance. It takes conscious effort to maintain it. And it's just not balancing the time, but the feel of what your body and mind need. Listen to your body - it knows what it needs. You'll feel better, really.