For successful people, work and life are not two different words but one!

KATHMANDU: Shreya flew to the United States last month. Never mind the Nepali cuisine, homesick is the new bully on the block, bugging her emotional system a bit too much lately. Like the rest of the world, she has learned to lock it up whenever she has got some time to spare. She picks up her iPhone, plugs in her Klipsch S series she bought via eBay based on CNET reviews and makes a call home. Her mother complains over Viber.

In other parts of the world, uncle Paul is seeing and talking to his best baccalaureate buddies across three different continents at once, Gabriela is bulking up on her bank of knowledge from an online Encyclopaedia to complete her assignments, Nana Jean is recovering sooner than she had expected and Myeong is pleased that his long distance relationship is now more of a comfortable reality.

Work-life balance is not a task, it is an activity, and activities are attached to preferences. So quintessentially, it is whatever suits you best

Thanks to technological advancements, we get to experience major desirable shifts in our lives every now and then. Workplace flexibility has been an added brain child. Mails to emails, seminars to webinars, to-do-lists to Wunderlist and local markets to global markets. Emailing, calling, texting, instant messaging, faxing — these are all great mediums that allow you to work without being at work. Today, it’s believable and very possible for someone to work full-time from home!

That explains why some of our wallets are full; hooray to infrequent petrol pump visits. But does that explain why your boss thinks it’s absolutely okay to ring you up at 8 pm? And why in the world is your ex-client texting you at 5:34 am?

Probably fond of your twitter followers, are you as fond of your work following you? Here are a series of the right questions with the right answers and everything in between just to help you strike that work-life balance. Shall we?

1. DO I WANT A 9 TO 5?

Have you ever imagined summer without winter, the sun without the moon, men without women and all things vice versa? Under the circumstances of one without the other, you could bellow ‘Life is so monotonous’ and it would still be an understatement. If you spend most or all of your time working, you will grow out of it.

Then again, you bid farewell to 9 to 5 as soon as you introduced yourself to that smartphone, that laptop and that tablet of yours in your favourite colour. Technological advancements make it impossible and inconvenient for the 9 to 5 notion to exist in the future. The key lies in working smart, not working long or short hours.

2. SO THEN HOW ABOUT I HAVE A SET NUMBER OF HOURS EVERY DAY FOR WORK AND LIFE?

That is another major pitfall right there given you are the anxious kind. Inflicting yourself to, say, a strict nine hours per day to working and the remaining time to your personal needs will make you think about getting away while you are working and muse upon your unproductive day during your personal hours. Still, work-life discipline is productive for people who like to neatly compartmentalise each aspect — “I do not bring business home”, they would say. A third type would be those who work hard and then play hard.

3. WHAT IS MY TYPE? HOW CAN I FIND A BALANCE/INTEGRATION THAT WORKS BEST FOR ME?

In all honesty, the following sentence is going to make or break you. If you are genuinely passionate about what you do, you would not need a balance. Elon Musk works 80 to 100 hours per week. Elizabeth Holmes works every day from wake-up time to snooze time. For successful people, work and life are not two different words but one!

Of course, work-life balance is not a task, it is an activity, and activities are attached to preferences. So quintessentially, it is whatever suits you best. Just be kind to your needs.

The author is a Business Development/ Marketing Consultant and a freelance trainer. Say hi at kunjika.p@gmail.com or ping her on twitter @KunjikaP