“Work-life balance” is the new buzz-phrase. Several major news outlets posted articles on work-life balance just this week. Business Insider, Time, and Huffington Post (they actually posts two, here’s a link to the second one), and Forbes all weighed in on this hot new topic.
We’ve all been there. Your home life affects your work, and your work life affects your private time. It’s becoming both increasingly important and difficult to define that boundary and abide by that separation. The smart phone plays a huge role in the blurring of that work-life line. Your phone ‘dings’ at home with work emails and at work with social media apps. Still, our phones have become so important in our daily lives, they’re not going away even though they add to the work-life imbalance. It is crucial to set your own “email office hours.” It can be as simple as not reading work emails after a certain hour, or as complicated as using a phone silencing app. It’s worth every bit of time it will take you to figure out how the app works. If that isn’t possible, your best solution is to take your work email information off of your phone entirely.
It can be even more complicated if you work for yourself or you have a non-traditional work schedule. Working from home can present issues if clear boundaries are not upheld. It’s important to establish a few basic rules when you make your own schedule. Scheduling regular “get away from the desk” breaks, lunch breaks, and office hours will enable you to work from home a little more effectively. They help you break up the day and give you headspace to re-prioritize and re-focus on the tasks at hand.
Assessing your self-inflicted stress levels might also help with work-life balance. Simple solutions to reduce self-inflicted stress are making sure you’re punctual and prepared for work, maintaining your vehicle so that your drives to/from work don’t contribute to a longer, more stressful workday, and keeping a shared work/home calendar so that you can anticipate potential pitfalls in your work days and off days. Keeping realistic goals and timelines will help you plan ahead, and planning ahead can eventually lead to success.