How to ensure balance and structure in your working life

It’s important to structure your work and have an overview of your tasks – and it’s important that you take time off as well. Otherwise, everything will blend together, your brain will not have time to recover, and your work-life balance will go awry.

First, you need to find out about your new workplace and the system. Do you need to be there at 8:30 at the latest? Are you “master” of your own diary or is it controlled by appointments from customers? Can you work from home, and do you have to work at evenings/weekends? Are there quiet rooms at the office where you can concentrate? When you have an overview of the system, it’s time to test how you work best within it.

Tips on how to structure your working day

• Planning: Start your day by making a list of tasks you need to perform. Prioritise them by importance and deadline.
• Break-up: Break up your day into several blocks and dedicate your time for different tasks. One block may be replying to emails or focused working time.
• Know your energy level: Focus on the most urgent or resource-intensive tasks in the time slots when you have most energy. Do you work best in the morning or just after lunch?
• No multitasking: Focus on one task at a time to improve quality and minimise errors.
• Take breaks: It’s good to take breaks. A breather now and again prevents fatigue and can give you new energy that increases the quality of your work.
• Time management: Use your calendar, reminders, notifications, apps or other tools to keep track of your time and meet deadlines.
• Evaluate your day: Spend a little time on reviewing what went well and what could be improved.
• What about tomorrow: Finish your day by looking at tomorrow’s tasks. This makes it easier for you to plan your next working day when you arrive at work.

Video: How to structure your working day

Figure out which style of working works for you

You definitely have experience from your time as a student or from your student job that you can use to structure your time.
“Think back on your time as a student and about when during the day you were best at concentrating and how you handled deadlines. Were you most effective in the morning or in the evening? Did you prefer being in good time with your tasks or were you best under pressure? We all have different energy levels and perform best at different times during the day,” says Sanne Mattebjerg, a career consultant at IDA.

Some people can focus for longer periods without problem, and others need shorter, intense intervals with short breaks in between. When you know what you prefer, try actively to follow the pattern that suits you. Perhaps you could write “focus time” in your calendar to show your colleagues that you’re not available in this specific time interval. If you’re not physically at the workplace and you need to focus without disturbance, it’s okay to say to your colleagues that you have to concentrate on a task and that you will be unavailable.

You need to ask yourself whether you work best close to a deadline, or whether you’re more comfortable spreading your work over a carefully planned schedule. Use this knowledge in your new job – and see if it works in your new framework or whether the working rhythm in your team or your tasks require you to work in a different way than you prefer.

Your immediate manager will also play an important role

“Aligning your expectations with your manager is key to structuring and balancing your work time,” says Sanne Mattebjerg. She elaborates:
“It’s particularly important to be structured, if, like most other people, you have unspecific working hours and, in principle, can work from anywhere at any time: especially if, like many workplaces, your workplace lacks labour. This means that you must be good at setting boundaries for yourself in terms of when your working day ends, and leisure time begins, and the number of tasks you have. If you feel that you have too much to do and therefore find it difficult to do everything within your working hours, talk to your manager. Your manager is responsible for ensuring that you have an appropriate workload. Your manager is also responsible for helping you prioritise your tasks or for helping you find out whether your work can be done in a way that suits both you and the workplace. Remember, you also have to take care of yourself, your family, friends and interests, without having to think about deadlines and urgent tasks.”

Of course, it may be difficult to say no to tasks or leave early on a Friday when you also want to make yourself seen and show your new manager that hiring you was the right decision. But Sanne Mattebjerg has some somewhat surprising advice in this regard: You should actually underperform slightly at the beginning of your new job.

“Start small, then you can only pleasantly surprise. Instead of throwing yourself into everything you can get hold of in the first couple of weeks, take your time to get to know the work processes and get a good feeling of how much time you spend on the different tasks. You don’t have to prove yourself in the short term, but in the long term,” the career consultant says.

Remember that you’re always welcome to contact IDA’s consultants if you need help to structure your work.