5 Tips to Improve Your Work-Life Balance

We hear remote workers complaining these days about how every day just kind of rolls into the next one with no break. We feel you! Finding work/life balance when you work from home is difficult. It’s hard enough when you’re going into an office and the workload is high. We have five tips for improving your work/life balance, whether you’re still commuting or just rolling out of bed and getting to work.

Why Improving Your Work/Life Balance Matters

Many employees tell us that it’s gotten increasingly difficult to manage their work/life balance over the past few months. While they’re grateful for being able to work from home, learning to adjust to the demands of an increased workload with children at home, higher demands at work, longer hours, and more home responsibilities have made each day a blur for many workers.

The trick is to find work/life balance when the home is your work. For remote workers, there is no delineation between work life and home life. But finding this balance is important. It can reduce stress and burnout in overstressed employees. When you work in an office, the commute and the workload are often stressful, so work/life balance helps you alleviate some of these pressures. When you work from home, it’s easy to put in long work hours in front of the computer before you even realize it. Finding a balance between work and life helps you better enjoy both. Here are five ways to improve your outlook by finding work/life balance:

1. Start by making your health a priority. If you set aside time at lunch to take a walk, or establish a routine where you do yoga for 15-minutes before work, it will help you take better care of yourself. It also serves to establish some boundaries between tasks, so your day doesn’t feel like one long work session.
2. Set aside some time to unplug every day. It’s so easy to be sucked into the digital world. But cutting those ties, even if it’s a half-hour per day, will save your eyesight from blue screen strain and let your mind naturally focus on something other than work tasks, politics, and cat videos.
3. Really take a vacation. Even if it ends up as a stay-cation where you paint your bathroom, it gets you away from work drama. It turns out Americans are notoriously bad at taking time off; one study showed 52% of full-time workers leave unused vacation on the table every year. Whether you’re in an office or working remotely, if you have vacation time—use it!
4. Set aside time every day for the people you care about. Working isn’t your life, and it shouldn’t keep you away from your family and loved ones. This is especially important today, when a global pandemic is still wreaking havoc on the world.
5. Establish work hours. If it’s 9 to 5, don’t get sucked into a Slack message at 7 pm. Set some boundaries, let your colleagues know you’re doing that, and stick to it. (Make sure your boss understands that you’re trying to establish work/life balance, of course.)