Balance your roles at work and at home effectively so as to not make either side suffer, with advice from the Harvard Business Review article “How to Juggle Multiple Roles.” Within your life outside of work, you have several sub-roles: parent, significant other, friend, member of various organizations, and so on. And at work, if you’re a small business owner or manager, you probably juggle dozens of roles at a time. The problem is, if you’re having problems in one role, it tends to negatively impact the others. To be at your best in all facets, you have to find and maintain the perfect balance. Research shows us a few things about how to go about this:

1. Prioritize roles. According to research from Wayne State University, setting goals and priorities inside and outside of work alleviates stress and conflict. Think about what you want to achieve in each role and prioritizing the importance of each role within the scheme of your life. Making conscious decisions will help you keep things generally in order, and then you can identify “spill over” areas and find ways to manage them.
2. Think about the integration and separation of roles. Research also shows that some people like to keep their work and non-work roles totally separate, while others like to integrate them. This choice is based on personal preference, and there’s no right or wrong answer, but one should be aware of this sliding scale and set his or her own boundaries.
3. Determine important activities for each role. “Sometimes, success means staying in the moment for our roles and focusing on the behaviors that we must do for that particular role,” the article explains. Lay out the behaviors associated with each role, and don’t let less important activities interfere when it’s time for the more important ones.

Click here to read the article from Harvard Business Review.