Finding a better work-life balance can be the key to a positive self-care formula. Work-life balance helps you effectively juggle your responsibilities of work, home life, and relationships.
Perhaps you regularly experience dominant workdays which are even prioritised in your “down-time”, where your personal relationships are being negatively affected. However, you also have career aspirations and desires which you’re adamant in reaching. How can you decide on which side to prioritise? Do you have to prioritise one side?
It can be very difficult to have a healthy work-life balance, especially if you feel overwhelmed with responsibilities. Before we look at ways you can improve your work-life balance, let’s look at the benefits of having a healthy work-life balance.
What are the benefits of a work-life balance?
The benefits of a positive work-life balance can extend beyond your own needs. Not only can they intrinsically benefit you, but work-life balance can present advantages to your organisation.
- Fewer Health Issues: Overworking can have negative health consequences on people, which may include Fatigue, Stress, and Burnout. These ultimately lead to poorer health from neglected healthy habits, deteriorated relationships, and an increased chance for substance abuse, smoking, and alcohol consumption. A work-life balance can help you avoid these negative consequences of overworking.
- Higher Productivity: Too much time spent working is directly linked to a loss of productivity in the workplace. Researchers found that employees who work 50 hours or more, their output falls dramatically. The same research uncovered that workers who reach 70 hours a week don’t produce anything more with the additional 15 hours. So, a work-life balance can help employees feel more energised, creative, and collaborative.
- Fewer Burnouts: Burnout is a form of mental exhaustion, and is a sign that your health at work isn’t in a great place. With a work-life balance, burnout isn’t as much of a risk when you’re breaking up your time equally between relaxing and working.
- More Mindfulness: This is the ability to maintain your awareness and focus on what you’re doing at any given moment. It’s quite difficult to achieve a mindfulness state, where distractions can prevent you from becoming entirely focused. Through having a work-life balance, you can achieve a more mindful state when you can flexibly manage your personal obligations on top of work.
What causes a poor work-life balance?
Here are the most common causes of a poor work-life balance:
- Increased Expenses with No Rise in Salary. 1/3 of employees cited this as their top challenge to maintaining a work-life balance.
- Increased Work Responsibilities. Around half of millennials and Gen X participants cited additional work responsibilities as a leading cause of a poor work-life balance.
- Increased Home Responsibilities. More than 40% of millennials and Gen X participants said more responsibility at home made it more challenging to balance work and personal life.
- Longer Working Hours. 46% of managers work more than 40 hours per week, and 40% say that their hours have increased over the past 5 years.
- Having Children. 26% of millennials said that they are working more since having a child, where 50% of women and 22% of women took a career break once they had a child.
How to improve your work-life balance
Here are some of our tips on how you can improve your work-life balance:
1. Learn to Say No.
When you have an abundance of responsibilities and commitments, it can be hard to say “no”. While it may be viewed as being beneficial to say “yes” all the time, it’s even more important to have boundaries.
Learn to prioritise tasks, and you can do this by assessing typical daily demands you have on your plate. Use the Eisenhower Matrix to understand which tasks you can do yourself, those which you can do at a later date, ones which you can delegate to others, and tasks you can just get rid of.
Saying “no” to things that are less of a priority helps you free up time and energy for you to say “yes” to other things which may be more important to you.
2. Take Breaks.
Even taking a 30-second microbreak can:
- Improve concentration
- Reduce stress
- Keep you engaged
- Make work more enjoyable
Now we’re not saying you should procrastinate and heavily focus on taking breaks by going on your phone. But, you should have a good routine of taking consistent breaks when you’re working. Maybe go for a five-minute walk round the block, or read three pages of your book.
MIT senior lecturer, Robert Pozen, recommends taking a 15 minute break every 75-90 minutes – where your brain can consolidate and retain learning.
3. Use Your Lunch Break.
Leading on from the previous point, your lunch break is a perfect example of a break which you’re granted by your employer. You may be thinking that you need to prove your work ethic by working through your lunch break, but realistically this can do more damage than good.
Take the time to enjoy your meal, it’s your right! It also gives you the opportunity to refresh your brain and come back more energised than you were before your break.
4. Ask for Flexibility.
Having an honest and open conversation with your employer about your needs can be the first steps to having an ideal schedule for your career. As the world becomes digitally accessible, so is work. It’s easier for workers to carry out their work from any device, so employers are more inclined now more than ever to offer flexible working packages to their staff.
5. Prioritise Your Health.
Recognising the importance of physical, emotional, and mental health is the first step to making it a priority in your life.
If you’ve read “Atomic Habits” by James Clear, then you’ll already know about Habit Stacking. This is a concept that incorporates supportive actions into your day, where each action can complement each other. Read here for more information on building good habits and breaking bad habits.
For example, you have the habit of going to the gym 6pm every day during the week, so before you put your gym clothes on you can get into the habit of messaging a family member about your day. You can then stack onto this habit, that while you are messaging the family member, you drink a litre of water. Once you build these habits, it makes it harder for you to break them – ultimately leading to a healthier lifestyle!
Here are some examples of habits you can stack to improve your wellbeing:
- Daily meditation
- Movement/exercise
- Social connection
- A gratitude practice
- Committing to using your paid time off
6. Practice Self-Compassion.
One of the most important ways to achieve a sense of work-life balance is to let go of being a perfectionist. Perfectionism may have brought around some success during school and early career, but the stress of it can accumulate over time. The strain on our system and emotional resources increase as our responsibilities increase.
Everyone struggles, so you should recognise that life isn’t always easy, and you’re not going to always get it right. Once you recognise this truth, you can create a shift toward a more compassionate growth-and-learning approach to work and life. This can help to support a sense of balance.
7. Invest in Relationships.
The lack of strong relationships increases the risk of a premature death from all causes by 50%. Solid connections and social support can improve health and increase longevity, so make sure you spend your time nurturing relationships that matter to you. If you take the previous steps to unplug, then you’ll be able to give more attention to the people you spend your time with.
8. Prioritise Quality Time.
It’s important to truly understand what’s most valuable to you, where you can take an honest look at how you should spend your personal time. Which activities are more life-enhancing to you? Once you decide on this, you can build a plan around the more important activities in your life, where you can prioritise high-value relationships.
This includes your own relationship with yourself, where you have downtime and allow yourself to enjoy that quality time alone to re-energise.
9. Ask for Help.
Never forget that you’re not alone. There will always be someone in the world who will listen with welcoming ears. When you ask other people for help, you can give someone the gift of giving – where they can act as part of a solution to a problem. This can give people a feeling of righteousness, and a sense of being a support system. When people generally get this feeling, they’re much more inclined to give a helping hand!
Let us know how you get on with improving your work-life balance!
Have tips on getting a good work-life balance? Give us an email at [email protected], or let us know on our LinkedIn or Facebook Pages!
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