10 Tips for Maintaining A Healthy Work-Life Balance

Having a healthy work-life balance, whereby you devote enough time to your work and personal life, is crucial to succeeding in both.

With many employees working overtime and bringing work home from the office, this has always been difficult for some. This is even more so the case now with so many people working remotely from their homes.

Having a balance between work and personal and feeling satisfied in both can be negatively affected by many things. These include increased responsibilities at work and/or at home such as working longer hours or changes to children’s schedules.

However, even if you feel like you need to “do it all”, it’s crucial to ensure you constantly make time for each element of your life and don’t take on too much in any one area.

Keep reading for our 10 tips on maintaining a healthy work-life balance to keep you motivated and satisfied in all areas of your life.

Why A Healthy Work-Life Balance Is Important

Work-life balance refers to separating your professional and personal lives while ensuring both get the attention they need. It involves spending the time you need on work tasks and necessary personal tasks as well as on yourself and activities you love to do.

Having a healthy work-life balance is important for maintaining your mental wellbeing and reducing the chance of burnout while still meeting your career goals.

By having a positive mindset and balancing work and personal time, you’ll be more productive during work hours and enjoy personal time more.

Having a healthy work-life balance is important for maintaining your mental wellbeing and reducing the chance of burnout while still meeting your career goals.

Tips For Maintaining A Healthy Work-Life Balance

If you think your work-life balance needs to be improved, try these ten top tips.

1. Practice Effective Time Management

Maintaining a healthy work-life balance starts with organizing your work schedule and being effective at time management. It’s always important to set a work schedule and generate to-do lists. This is especially important if working at home.

If you don’t have a set schedule and an understanding of the time it will take to complete certain tasks then you can end up with too much to do each day. This may also lead to you taking on more than you should.

The problem with this is that you’re likely to need to work overtime. When at home it can be tempting to just keep working past your usual end of day.

However, this means you’ll be cutting into a lot of personal time. Without a set schedule and daily work hours that you need to adhere to, you may feel like you always need to be working as you now have no separation between work and home.

Be realistic with yourself and colleagues about your workload and deadlines. Try to do as much as you can but if you’ve completed these tasks before and know they can't be completed in a day, for example, move some tasks to another day, reducing the need to work overtime.

2. Have a Designated Workspace

An important element of having a good work-life balance when working from home, as mentioned, is having designated work and personal spaces. This means that you should have a specific place in your home for work, with the rest of your home being for personal activities.

Having a whole room that you can turn into a home office is ideal, but is not an option for most. Try to find an empty area to add a desk or choose just one place for work, such as the kitchen table. Then keep all other areas for non-work time (and work time breaks) only.

3. Take Breaks

Another thing you may omit more when at home or when busy at work is taking breaks. However, breaks can help you to unwind and return to your tasks more clear-headed and productive. Ensure you take all the breaks available to you and try to get up and walk around for five minutes every hour.

For those working at home, remember that even if you only took a long break for lunch at work, you likely were taking mental breaks that you didn’t think about such as chatting with a coworker.

Breaks can help you to unwind and return to your tasks more clear-headed and productive.

4. Don’t Answer Emails or Calls Outside of Office Hours

To maintain a healthy work-life balance, you should be completely switching off from work when your workday is done. A main element of this is not answering emails or phone calls when it’s not work hours.

To help facilitate this, make sure you keep on top of emails and calls during work hours. Getting emails or calls outside of work when you know you have more to deal with can lead to you answering them in free time to reduce the volume of emails/calls waiting for you.

To keep on top of emails and calls, reply to emails or make calls in the morning then again around midday, and deal with remaining ones before you end the workday. Getting a few emails or missed calls outside of work hours will then not seem as overwhelming.

5. Ensure You Have Personal Time

When your workday is over, try to focus on doing as many things you enjoy as possible. Everyone will have things they need to do after work such as errands or childcare. But take time each day for something you enjoy.

To ensure this is done, prioritize your personal activities. Note what needs to be done, such as errands, along with what you want to do for yourself. Then organize them so that the most important in both categories (necessary tasks and enjoyable activities) are completed.

If you don’t balance these two types of activity in your personal time, then your mental health may suffer which will affect your work life too.

6. Make Time for Exercise

Exercising frequently is great for both your physical and mental health. It’s highly recommended as a way to reduce stress and the chance of experiencing depression or anxiety.

These benefits make it the perfect activity for boosting your mood which will improve your work and personal life.

Try to make time for exercise each day. This could be a gym workout or participating in a sport. It could also be deciding to walk or bike places instead of driving. To encourage you to exercise, get a trainer or a workout buddy, or join a club doing a sport you enjoy.

Running is just one of many ways to get exercise and reduce stress, improving both your work and your personal life.

7. Spend Time With Family and Friends

When prioritizing work over your personal life, social relationships tend to suffer. To ensure this doesn’t happen, make time to spend with your most important social groups at least once each week.

If you find yourself needing to cancel social engagements, ask yourself why. If it’s because you have too much work or too many personal tasks, think about how you can adjust your schedule to reduce those and ensure you spend the time needed with friends and/or family.

8. Take Vacations

Make sure you take all your vacation days and try not to work on other days off such as statutory holidays.

If possible, take small vacations over the weekend too. Spending time outside of your normal area with lots of new places to see and things to do make it less likely that you’ll fall into working or answering emails during time off.

9. Have a Job You Love

Having a job you love will always help with maintaining a good work-life balance. If you do something you’re passionate about and enjoy, this will help keep your mood up at work and you’ll feel better in personal time as your mood isn’t down from the work day or week.

You’ll also reduce the chance of burnout which will affect your mood at work and outside of work.

However, this could encourage you to work longer hours and take on more tasks which isn’t always the best thing. As mentioned, ensure you set solid work hours and end your workday when you should each day, limiting the amount of overtime you work.

10. Communicate Concerns

A main reason for not having a good work-life balance is taking on too much at work, in your personal life, or both. To avoid this, communicate with those asking you to take on the task and don’t be afraid to say no to things if you don’t have time, is not something you’re required to do, or you don’t enjoy.

For example, if you feel like you’re asked to work late too much or feel required to answer work emails during time off, talk to your manager. Explain how this is affecting your personal time and that if more needs to be done by you, some other tasks may have to be taken off your plate to facilitate accomplishing everything within your set hours.

Even with personal time, don’t commit to more than you can handle and don’t commit to things that you don’t really want to do, unless absolutely necessary.

If you’d rather learn a new skill than go out to lunch with friends, for example, don’t be afraid to do so. Conversely, if you enjoy socializing with friends, don’t feel pressured necessarily to diversify your activities if you don’t see that bringing you many benefits.