Being passionate about your work is both a luxury and an invaluable facet of achieving the best results. A deep focus and attention to detail on projects helps make the workday more engaging and makes the final product that much more gratifying to have achieved. However, many in industries such as hydrology, geology, construction and the environmental sector have difficulty striking the right balance. Your work should occupy a reasonable amount of your mental bandwidth, but it should never become all-consuming. Failure to achieve a proper work-life balance can lead to burnout and a loss of passion for your field, but more than that, it can lead to issues with your personal life and even mental health.

One of the best ways to pursue a healthy balance between work life and home life is to create effective systems and structures that eliminate or expedite strenuous or monotonous processes. While management and team communication play their parts in this, it is a very difficult goal to reach without the technology that will allow your organization to do so. Using dated or subpar software can often require much more of the user’s time and energy, which can be avoided when using a software that has more powerful capabilities, better UX design, and a team of developers that truly understand what it is you do. Whether it’s mapping or graphing software, it’s critical that you seek options which allow you to either automate or expedite project work to avoid bottlenecks, free up project hours, and, most importantly, prevent burnout among your team. Here are a few key features and capabilities that will help you strike the right balance so you can do more of the work you care about without becoming jaded.

If your firm works extensively with LiDAR surveys, and your team members constantly find themselves parsing multiple sets of data by hand, you should know that there are options that can help eliminate this time-consuming and exhausting process. Certain products allow you to combine grids with maps in order to present combined data and results automatically without the legwork of parsing the data by hand. Did you know that some innovative mapping software will even allow you to open a 3D view with the click of a button if you find yourself perplexed by the 2D representation?

The demands of graphing can also be eased by finding a graphing software that allows you to create customized scripts or offer predesigned templates that will review monthly trends and create a graph in a matter of seconds as opposed to undergoing the same repetitive process each month

Few things in a work setting are more frustrating than encountering an issue that you simply can’t solve, no matter how many hours you spend seeking answers on YouTube or Google. This is often made worse by ineffective customer support; whether it’s an unhelpful chat bot, an outsourced CSR who simply doesn’t understand the problem, or worse yet, a company that makes it all but impossible to receive any support at all. Conversely, you may be using an inconsistent open-source software that simply does not have an office. Fortunately, there are dedicated companies out there staffed by industry veterans who not only understand your issues, but also genuinely look forward to helping you solve your problem. Developers that care about their product also care about their customers and the projects they wish to accomplish.

Golden Software’s customer support is always provided by real people with a geoscience background and promises a reply within 1 business day.