Work-Life Balance: Achieving a Healthier Harmony

Ten practical tips for finding greater balance between your professional and personal lives

Many of us struggle to improve our work-life balance as we juggle work with the requirements of day-to-day living. Naturally, this includes the need for periods of rest and relaxation so we can maintain a healthy mind and body.

When pursuing a better work-life balance, the first issue we run into is the lack of a clear-cut definition of what it should look like. This is because work-life balance depends entirely on your unique psychology and circumstances. It could mean working a four-day week so you can catch up with chores before the weekend. It could mean job-sharing so you can undertake professional development to enable a career change. It could simply mean starting at 9 am and finishing at 5 pm, with no need for out-of-hours working.

Some people face circumstances where a better work-life balance feels wholly unachievable. But if you see an opportunity to improve the equilibrium between your professional and personal lives, then our recommendation is to treat it like a transformation project. That means getting from where you are now to where you want to be.

Like any managed transformation, try to set an objective and define a strategy for achieving it. However, transforming successfully will require a keen understanding of both your existing situation and the one you wish to achieve. This can be tricky to dissect, so here are ten practical tips to help you journey towards a better work-life balance.

Work-Life is a Two-Way Relationship

Our professional and personal lives go out of balance when one side detrimentally impacts the other. Most commonly, we tend to focus on work as the source of the problem, such as preventing us from being with loved ones or spending time pursuing other goals. But personal life can just as easily impact our jobs. Caring for an ill relative will greatly affect our ability to work, as will other challenges such as health issues. When pursuing a better work-life balance, always see it as a two-way relationship so you can examine both sides objectively.

Checks and Imbalances

When examining your existing situation, look for aspects of your professional life that are putting undue pressure on your personal life, and vice versa. Fatigue, stress, irritability and depression are easily noticeable warning signs of problems. However, humans can be highly resilient and adaptable and, like the boiling frog, we may be less aware of subtler indications. For example, are tasks piling up at home or at work? Have relationships with people become distant or strained? Look closely at your life and be open to exploring any aspects that are less than ideal. It is not uncommon to discover that something you feel you cope with is actually the heart of an imbalance.

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Clarify Your Feelings

Another challenge of the human mind is that we don’t always associate our feelings with the right causes. For example, we might think stress is work-related, but the cause may actually be a steadily escalating difficulty in our personal lives. Equally, we might feel unhappy at home, but the cause is actually to do with a change at work, such as a sense of losing control. Always try to think broadly about the causes of your feelings across both sides of the work-life equation.

Responsibilities and Desires

When picturing a better work-life balance, it may help to think in terms of responsibilities and desires. We all have unavoidable responsibilities in our professional and personal lives. Beyond that we have our unfulfilled desires, which could be professional, personal or both. Don’t ignore your desires as fulfilling them could be a key part of your ideal work-life balance. For example, you may decide to pursue a different role or even a change of career.

Unavoidable Responsibility or Self-Enforced Task?

Work-life balance is partly about having enough time, and we can easily fall into the trap of taking on too much or trying to achieve everything to the same high standard. This may be necessary for unavoidable responsibilities, but do you sometimes feel overwhelmed by less important tasks? The pressure to take them on and do them well often flows from our expectations of our own behaviour or concerns about other people’s expectations. Your ideal work-life balance may require you to be more practical about what actually deserves your precious time.

Always On Means Never Off

Expectations often play a role in the pressure to be ‘always on’, which has become more prominent since the pandemic. If a colleague is working after hours and sends us a message, we can feel compelled to respond immediately. It might be that we don’t want to hold them up, or we worry about being seen as a blocker. Most organisations experience difficulties that necessitate some out-of-hours work, but ‘always on’ is detrimental and often unnecessary. If work can happen anywhere and anytime, you are always in work mode. This can be extremely unhealthy, so set boundaries and manage colleague expectations about when you are available and unavailable outside regular working hours.

Ask

What does work-life balance actually mean to your employer? It’s worth having the conversation at multiple levels to ensure your perception meets reality. What is the official line from HR? What does your line manager say? Many nations such as the UK face a skills shortage that forces organisations to compete for talent. Offering a better work-life balance has become one of the key strategies to achieve this, such as remote working and flexible hours. Have the conversations, and you may discover you have enough leverage to make some big improvements.

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Build Your Routine… or Break it

Routine can be a blessing or curse for achieving a better work-life balance, but changing it can be highly beneficial. If you feel overwhelmed by too many ad hoc demands at work or at home, then try to build a stricter routine into your day. Start and end work at specific times, and allocate particular times for particular tasks. Support this new approach by enforcing boundaries and managing the expectations of colleagues and family members. On the other hand, if you feel stuck in a routine that perpetuates an imbalance, then it’s time to do a little breaking to establish a new one.

Use Technology as a Distancer

Technology has become the great connector, bringing us together so we can collaborate wherever we are in the world. As accelerated use of video calls and productivity tools exacerbated the problems of being ‘always on’, technology providers responded with new functionality to help us manage our constant state of connection. Take advantage of this by setting quiet periods when notifications won’t be received, or changing your online status so you can get some uninterrupted work done.

Is Traditional Working Right for You?

It’s worth asking the question. The job market has changed dramatically over the last decade, and most organisations are more flexible about hours, location and job format. Even job sharing at a senior level is more common than it was a decade ago. But there are other options if you want even greater flexibility, such as freelancing, contracting or gig working. One of these options may be better for you, even temporarily as you move towards a different role or career that gives you the work-life balance you desire.