How To Maintain A Healthy Work-Life Balance
Working from home doesn’t have to be unhealthy, here’s why.
As someone who works remotely all of the time, ensuring that I make the most out of my day so that I have time to do what I love is essential. People who work from home often find that their work can run into their own time, but it’s important to maintain a healthy work-life balance, even if you work in the comfort of your own sofa.
There are lots of positives to working remotely. If anything, it is probably what a lot of jobs will look like in the future as we become ever more reliant on digital technology. But there are, as with most things, some negative aspects of working remotely too.
To combat them, here are 3 simple ways to manage your time more effectively and to ensure that you are as productive as possible during your working hours.
3 Simple ways to manage your work time more effectively
1.) Write your to-do list the night before
The worst feeling when you start work in the morning often comes from sitting down at your desk with coffee in hand when you suddenly think, “What do I need to do today?”. Unfortunately, it usually culminates in pulling hair and a lot of grumbling. This is a bad start to the day.
“Either your run the day, or the day runs you.”
– Jim Rohn
Writing your to-do list down the night before is really important. It’s better to get into the habit of writing this list at the end of the working day so that everything you need to do the next day is still fresh in your mind. This helps to structure the day and prioritize what needs doing in advance. Once the working day is over, you can then start fresh in the morning with a list readily available for you to work through effectively and efficiently. Eureka!
Though things may change as priorities shift, at least you’ll be able to start the day with a fresh mind and a clear priorities list to start from. Being able to structure your day more easily with your list readily prepped will reduce stress and start the day on a positive note.
2.) Keep to a realistic schedule
When we talk about schedules, the main thing that we need to remember is that a good schedule has one essential ingredient, it can be maintained.
“Struggle doesn’t make success happen. In fact, struggle can prevent success from happening. If you seek struggle, you will find it. If you seek ease, you will find it.”
– Rich Fettke
The last thing that you want to do is start on the wrong foot from the very start of a working day. There is a natural swing-of-things that we need to find when we’re working, something that takes time to discover.
We all need to find a way of working that not only works for us, but that allows us to work more effectively than we ever thought we could. Creating a realistic schedule is the most important part of becoming efficient during the working day. When working remotely from home, being efficient and being able to maintain a schedule is essential.
The more difficult you make life for yourself during the working day, the less likely you are to work productively which often means that we work beyond our work time and aren’t paid for the overtime.
Creating a positive environment for yourself with a schedule that you feel positive about will not only make you feel good, but it will improve your work ethic. You’ll soon find that you’re getting more work done in a shorter period of time than you thought you could, and the better your work ethic, the more efficiently you’ll work.
3.) Take enough breaks
Being efficient doesn’t mean that you can’t cut yourself a bit of slack. Human beings are very capable and can push themselves to great lengths when they need to, but it’s important to take a break when your brain tells you that it needs one.
“You don’t have to make yourself miserable to be successful.”
– Andrew Wilkinson
The fact of the matter is, don’t be afraid or resist taking a short break when your brain tells you to. Hard work always feels worthwhile when we take a short break now and again, whether that’s doing a few push-ups, going for a short walk, or drinking a coffee for ten minutes.
There’s more to working that just plodding through it. Our creativity as human beings relies on us being inspired and our positive emotions. We can help to fuel both our motivation and our inspiration if we take breaks during the day to relax and get realigned.
The moral of the story is, be nice to yourself. You can work hard and be efficient without working every hour that you are awake during the day. From my own experience, when you’re inspired, your lifetime will fill with work rather than work filling your working time.
Other ways to improve your work-life balance
Particularly when you work from home, there are a number of things that can help you to maintain a healthy work-life balance.
“Never get so busy making a living that you forget to make a life.”
– Dolly Parton
I’ve talked about 3 tips for maintaining a work-life balance in this article that do wonders for improving efficiency and productivity during the working day. But if you want to take it another step further and really jazz up your lifestyle, try integrating these healthy mindset habits into your working day too.
1.) Adopt a new ethos: ‘Work smarter, not harder’.
This sounds very cliche, but if you read anything written by the richest people in the world (including Bill Gates), then you’ll know that this ethos is invaluable. Sometimes, it’s easy to think that working throughout the day means that an exact amount of work done will get done, but what if that same amount of work could be done in half the time?
Well, it’s highly likely that it is possible for you to do your work in a shorter period of time. The problem is, if we don’t spend time thinking about how we can do things as efficiently as possible. Instead, we constantly fall into the same trap of using up the time that we are given to complete menial tasks. By adopting this ethos, you think less about filling the time you have and spend more time thinking about how you can achieve your priority tasks more efficiently. It’s an ethos worth adopting, that’s for sure.
2.) Make time for self-development each day
Multiple studies have been done in the past on millionaire habits, including a study by Thomas C. Morely. According to Morley, most millionaires (including self-made ones) share a number of common habits. These habits include consistent self-development such as reading, exercising and sleeping enough at night. In his book, Morley wrote in-depth about the habits of self-made, highly successful people and the lessons that we can all learn from them.
By making time to improve ourselves, the learning of new skills can aid in the prevention of working too much, thereby improving the work-life balance. So, instead of working on a task that seems important for work into the evening, self-development provides us with another project to keep us busy, improving ourselves.
Key takeaways
A work-life balance is a state of equilibrium where the demands of personal life, family life and professional life are equal.
Many people that work in an office most of the time might prefer the atmosphere of being around others and bantering with colleagues. However, the global health crisis has thrown the world’s ‘normal’ into turmoil. We are now embarking on a a ‘new normal’ that will take us all a while to get used to.
While working in an office can be beneficial in some ways, primarily due to its division of the home and work environments, having a work-life balance can be difficult to achieve in the office environment too.
The 3 tips for maintaining a work-life balance discussed in this article have worked wonders for me, particularly running my own business from home. You can take it a step further to really jazz up your lifestyle and start enjoying your work more by integrating the extra habits mentioned into your repertoire as well.
To increase our working efficiency while at the same time ensuring that our mental health remains strong, we must constantly keep the work-life balance equilibrium in check. If you think that you need to make some adjustments to your work-life lifestyle, try implementing these tips and see how they fair for you. You might be surprised by how much positive change they can bring.
