Work Life Balance – the “new normal” Dashboard

Challenge

Over the course of the last 12 months my work life and my personal life boundaries have started to blur.

I’m the Principal Architect of a cloud solutions company so my day job has been thriving and there’s a huge amount of opportunity. But because I’m working from home, I want to make sure it doesn’t take over my family life.

My technical background has meant I’ve managed to adapt my family’s day to day life to the “New Normal”. Invariably though, this means spending even more time in front of the same screens and there’s a very real risk that sometimes the lines between my day job and my personal life can blur.

Dashboard walk-through

The dashboard is split into two parts, on the left is my work and the right my life.

The work side focuses on a collection of work-related metrics and information, helping me keep on top of communications, client services, and early warnings of changes that are coming.

Immediately I get a view of the following:

• Inbox: is a backlog of email building up? Now I can see without getting distracted by the content of the emails.
• Focus time: do I have enough time to focus booked in my calendar?
• MS Change Control: are there client impacting issues scheduled by Microsoft?
• Team management: what is the team working on right now, and for which clients? And who needs chasing to submit a timesheet?

The life side of the dashboard brings a focus to my personal life, which helps redress the balance. This side of the dashboard covers everything from birthday reminders for those closest to me and other important events in my personal life, to the general wellbeing and health of my family, plus comfort and a little fun. These are the reminders we all need sometimes about why we actually work!