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Summer Is Here!

How Good Is Your Work-Life Balance?

Friday, 23rd June 2017

By, GBS Corporate Training

#Summer #WorkLifeBalance #PersonalEffectiveness  @gbscorporate

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The summer solstice happens this week, representing the start of summer. The solstice occurs every June 21st, when the sun is directly above the Tropic of Cancer. It marks the longest day of the year and the day with the most hours of sunlight. 

Solstice comes from two Latin words – sol, meaning ‘Sun’ and sistere, meaning ‘to come to a stop’ or ‘stand still’, translating to ‘sun standing still’.

The summer solstice is often associated with change, nature and new beginnings, as the days start getting shorter and the nights longer. In fact, theories suggest that the builders of Stonehenge, the prehistoric monument in Wiltshire, used the solstice as a starting-point to count the days of the year. They used the June solstice to mark and align their calendar.

Perhaps summer is therefore the perfect time for us to take stock of what we want to achieve in the coming 12 months. It is also a time to start planning how we are going to achieve all of our goals, which means understanding how we can maximise our effectiveness to reach our optimum productivity.

Is it hard to maintain a healthy work-life balance in the Summer?

In those immortal lyrics of George Gershwin, ‘Summertime, and the livin’ is easy’: with the longer daylight hours, our desire to want to do more flourishes. We wake up energised as we head to work in daylight and we even return home and it’s still daylight! We anticipate the entire evening available to spend with friends, get cracking on those awaiting household projects or to take part in a favourite hobby.

Unfortunately, finding the time to fit everything into your day is actually getting much harder with the constant demands for our attention from the 24/7 digital world. An excessive cognitive and digital overload impedes our productivity. Business people are being stretched more than ever before.

“Not since the digital revolution in the early '90s has technology placed such a comprehensive burden on business, employees and individuals to reinvent their business plans, services and products, and themselves to keep pace with the changing marketplace.”

Simon Mainwaring

Our ability to handle the volume of information coming at us from so many sources, and with the expectation of instant responses, is creating a predicament for many. Stress levels are increasing, and this is having an impact on productivity, and also wellbeing. We are all being constantly bombarded and interrupted.

In the summer, add into this time off for holidays, summer celebrations and the odd long weekend trip, it can be very hard to stay focused and productive at work.

“Deep summer is when laziness finds respectability.”

Sam Keen

Therefore, during the summer months, good time management practices are an absolute necessity! Learning new tools for improving your time management ability can reduce stress, as you will have a plan of how you get everything done. You can actually gain time to use personally, enabling you to optimise your work-life balance and managing to spend some of your summer evenings as you had hoped.

Acquiring effective Time Management skills, once learned, offer great benefits, including improvements to how you spend your day, keeping you motivated as you keep accomplishing more and helping to avoid procrastination.

GBS can help you make the most of your time in the Summer

GBS provides numerous Personal Impact and Effectiveness Courses to give you the skills and knowledge to make your working day easier, and improve your productivity in the workplace.

“Concentrate all your thoughts upon the work at hand. The sun’s rays do not burn until brought to a focus.”

Alexander Graham Bell

The GBS Time Management in the Modern Era course comprises of a highly practical and enlightening facilitator-led workshop, designed to help busy and pressurised employees cope with digital and information overload. We enable you to control events rather than be controlled by them.

Our workshop covers much more than other ‘conventional’ Time Management courses. GBS puts psychology before technology and helps participants develop a healthy mind-set and the ability to control events rather than events control them, as well as teaching you great tools and techniques to manage your inbox. We will teach you about the latest research and theory on brain health to help you maximise your productivity

Summer is also a perfect time to start planning what you want to achieve for the next 12 months. In the workshop, we will help you to create a personalised, practical system for prioritising and managing your ambitions and goals. You will gain a better sense of your priorities so that you can focus on achieving these and feel more productive. We also help you to create your own personal action plan to put into immediate effect.

Our training helps you to develop a healthy mind-set and the ability to control and maintain a healthy work-life balance - not just for the summer - but all year-round.

So if you want to make the most out of your valuable time in the summer – take control of your work-life balance and contact GBS today to book onto an upcoming workshop.