No matter how skilled you may be as professional in your field, there is no denying that combining career with family life is crucial for everyone who wants to keep their sanity intact. Contrary to popular belief, it is completely possible to balance work and family life without suffering a nervous breakdown from the logistics. Contributor Karl Magnusson, Career Coach – SalariesHub.

The following are also the most effective ways that you can easily manage both your work responsibilities and family obligations in a completely natural manner.

Lock down your circadian rhythm
Even at the very top percentile of professional skill, there can be a very wide degree of variance in the professional capabilities of an HR specialist simply due to the time of day. Even if you might be a person who is dependable for consistent commitment to excellence, your circadian rhythm may make you more or less productive than others of equal skill level as certain times of the day.

 Through no fault of your own, attempting to operate at times that fall out of alignment of your national circadian rhythm could compromise the performance. Your number one priority would be to determine whether or not you’re more productive in the morning or night. Based on what you can discover about your energy level at certain times of day, you can successfully shift your schedule around it so that you have the best of yourself ready to go when you need it the most.

Streamline meal times
Once you have determined what your best circadian rhythm productivity pattern is, you can streamline your meal times more effectively. If you make sure to have a pre-prepared lunch ready at all times, you can make sure that as much time as possible is spared while still being able to eat. If you can streamline your meals to be easily worked into your schedule instead of scheduling time around them, you can successfully give yourself two or even three extra hours of time by the end of the day that would have otherwise been spent catching up.

Assess promotion prospects
Carefully consider the logistics of any and all promotions that may be on the table for you. If a promotion in a certain sector would entitle you to receive more time off to yourself on a monthly basis, you very well may want to consider this as an incentive for pulling the right strings to head in that direction. Even a small amount of work and travel time during the month could prove invaluable for dedicating more time for your family off the books.

Explore the options you have to shorten commute time
It’s always a good idea optimise the location of your residence to make commuting an easy affair. If you can cut your drive to less than half an hour a day, you can save yourself about 3 hours over the course of the week in total. The more time that you can take back from your commute, the more time that you can allot to all other things in your life that need attention.

Free up all weekends immediately
Always leave your weekends open. Arrange for there to be a strict cut-off time on Friday evening for any professional communication that will not resume until the start of the next business day. It would be wise to establish your cut-off time in your professional environment as early as possible so that everybody’s on the same page about when you will not be available.

Whatever you can put down on a written schedule to pre-establish time allotted to personal time with the family more often, make sure that you write these things down as soon as possible. Even if they may seem like rather minor and tedious engagements to write down, you definitely want to systematise the way that you go about organising activities with your loved ones. Recitals, sports games, a little bit of tea time with your significant other and all other things should be locked down into regular time slots during the weekends that you dedicate to them.

Always allow for and anticipate a slight margin of error
Make contingency plans in case you aren’t always able to balance things exactly in the manner that you would like to. As much as we may like to always be able to schedule things perfectly, balance is sometimes impossible to maintain forever. Imbalance can be an inevitability of your efforts to establish balance, and so when there are setbacks, make sure that you aren’t too hard on yourself for it.

Openly communicate with everyone involved
Communicate things with your family just as thoroughly as you communicate things to the people in your professional field. By establishing that you are trying to achieve balance with everyone in your “inner circle”, there’s a much lower chance as your commitment to work being misinterpreted as neglect. The more that your family and co-workers understand what you are actively making an effort to create a good work-family life balance, the less stressful that the entire situation will be for everybody involved.

Incorporate regular physical activity into your plans
You will want to find a way to incorporate regular physical activity into whatever schedule it is that you establish to spend time with the family. Even though physical activity itself may not necessarily extend the number of hours that you have in the day, the endorphins released from getting physically active will put you in the best frame of mind to manage the challenges of combining career with family life. Physical activity will invigorate you and make it easier to maintain your morale as you work to find balance. As a positive side effect, this positive energy will create better feedback between you, your co-workers and family members at the same time.

The successful accomplishment of a proper work-family life as an HR generalist is a matter of playing smart, not attempting to reinvent the wheel or do anything extraordinarily ridiculously difficult. Get a handle on your circadian rhythm, streamline your meal times, look at your flexible promotion options, cut down on your commute time, keep your weekends open, communicate openly, and get physically active on a regular basis. As long as you allow yourself a bit of leeway to make mistakes and adjust, combining career with family life will become easy with time.