Manage Your Life with Outlook®: for Dummies®

Chapter 1. Planning for Better Balance between Your Work and Personal Life

Before you have any chance of becoming more productive, you really need to take stock of where you're at now regarding keeping your personal life and work in balance.

In this chapter, you begin this process by taking a good long look at your current level of personal productivity on the job and the typical symptoms of imbalance, and from there you imagine how you might improve it so as to create a better equilibrium between work and your personal life.

Next, you get a chance to take a look at the most common reasons people give for not being productive — in other words, all those pitiful excuses that you have for not being able to get it together in the productivity department.

Finally, you get the opportunity to look at some of the ways that Microsoft Outlook can help you become more productive at work and actually help you start making that goal of work/life balance a reality.

"If I Only Had a Life ..."

One surefire way to tell that your personal life and work aren't in balance is if you don't even think of yourself as really having a personal life. If your work not only takes center stage in your life but leaves little or no room for anyone or anything else, then I think you'd agree that you're in real need of regaining some kind of balance between your office and home. Another clear sign is if you always feel as though both at work and at home you don't have enough time to get all you have to do done, and ...