How To Balance Your Work Life To Be More Productive And Happy

Sometimes achieving work-life balance is not easy. Also, if you are permanently connected to your work through new technologies, the situation can become even more complicated. Hence the importance of setting limits to balance your work life.

To begin with, it is essential that you be aware that greater connection does not equal greater productivity. Therefore, stealing time from your family or hobbies does not imply higher performance either.

In fact, cruelty at work can very likely cause undesirable stressful situations that ultimately lead to discomfort and unhappiness. For this reason, finding balance in all facets of your life is considered a fundamental key to savoring well-being.

Signs that work is taking over your life

Tom Fryers, in one of his publications, identifies 3 types of people who work excessively:

• Those who run their own business and feel that it cannot be successful without it.
• Those who are employed, but totally absorbed in their work and cannot disconnect – like some academics and health workers.
• Those who work long hours because it is what the culture, the company or the society expects of them and they believe that to keep their job or get a promotion requires a 150% commitment.

Interestingly, while the first two groups are made up of people who tend to choose to work overtime on their own, in the third group this does not usually happen. Furthermore, this third group is more likely to experience the negative effects of a poor work-life balance.

This may be so because people in the first two groups, in some way, choose that kind of life, which is something that does not usually happen in the third group. That is why these people may be less likely to find meaning in what they are doing, so they can more easily feel that their life is not as under control as they would like.

Now, how to identify that we are in this type of situation? The following circumstances may warn us of the existence of some type of imbalance in your work life:

• Work more hours than other colleagues.
• Unable to disconnect at the end of the day.
• Feeling that personal worth depends solely on job success.
• Maintain tense and stressful personal relationships.
• Working life negatively affects health.

• Ignoring hobbies and leisure activities that were previously enjoyed.
• Feeling that you are left behind, no matter how much you do.

5 ideas to balance your work life

The key to balancing your life usually begins by balancing your work life, which is largely the one that determines almost everything else. The time you spend at work, the work tasks you do outside of your working hours, or deciding what is most important are under your control, even if it is hard to see.

Therefore, balancing your work life is possible and, as has been said, finding that balance with the other spheres of your life will promote high levels of well-being.

1. Use a journal to evaluate how you spend your days

How do you spend your days? Are you on autopilot or are you aware of everything that is going on? It is important that you reflect on it. The first step to change is accepting where you are, what you are doing, and how it affects you. While there are many tools and techniques that can help you, one of the easiest is to keep a journal.

In this way, we can have a detailed description of what generates more well-being in our day and thus start a time optimization project.

2. Organize, prioritize and discard

Understanding how you spend your time is another important point to balance your work life. From there, the next step would be to decide what deserves your attention and what you can discard.

One attitude you can adopt is ruthlessness. Therefore, prioritize what you need and discard what does not provide or take away energy without hesitation.

3. Digital detox

To balance your work life, and in the event that your work performance is closely linked to the use of technologies, it can be of great help to regularly detach yourself from the digital world. For example, you can keep your mobile phone for a certain period of time.

A recent study links the availability to work overtime hours or days with a decrease in the degree of subjective calm, mood and energy levels in the worker.

As the study authors point out, non-working hours during which employees are expected to respond to work problems would be incompatible with time off; from this incompatibility would arise a greater disconnection of stress from work.

4. Away from perfectionism

Much of what leads us to overwork and break down our work life balance is the need to do our best work. What’s more, in more than one person there is an overrated belief that if we don’t push ourselves a little beyond what is expected, we will be failing or will be punished, even with the loss of our job.

A problem with highly perfectionist people is that they tend to view mistakes as personal failures, rather than as a natural part of the normal learning and growth process. That is why these people can be victims of one of the following two negative habits:

• Procrastination for fear of not being able to complete the task to the level that we expect of ourselves.
• Belief that to do the job properly we must try harder than expected.

5. Limit activities and relationships that can waste your time

The balance of your work life depends not only on separating work from what is not, but also on feeling satisfied both at work and personally. 

Therefore, it is important that you dedicate part of your time to leisure activities or of any other type, but that you really want to do, as well as to be with people who you like and who you enjoy in their company.

Both activities and relationships that make you feel like you’re wasting your time not only don’t enrich you, but they can wear you out. Also, don’t forget that sometimes, if you feel like you’re wasting your time, it’s easier for you to be tempted to take advantage of it with something related to work.