How often is there overtime on your paycheck? While the extra cash can be rewarding (think a weekend on the beach), overextending yourself can have damaging effects on many aspects of your life. Your energy is depleted, your attitude could use an adjustment, and you don’t know how you can face another day at that soul-sucking job.
The cause of these issues is often a poor work life balance. Letting your life become unbalanced will leave at least one area lacking adequate attention.
Balance is important to maintain throughout our lives, especially the balance of how we spend our time. The proper use of time management can revolutionize how a person feels and who they are. If you are like most people, you likely haven’t thought much about the importance of work life balance. Yet, a recent report shows that an astonishing 66% of American workers are lacking work life balance.
That means that the majority of us are living our lives in a state of inefficiency, dissatisfaction, stress, and possibly even burnout.
This article will help you discover whether your work life balance is awry and provide you with tips on how to find equilibrium in each area of your life — leaving you feeling fulfilled and sure that you are living to your full potential.
Recommended: 33 Best Careers for Work-Life Balance (And Why They Work)
What is Work Life Balance Anyway?
Imagine that you have been given the honor of creating the perfect bouquet for your sister’s wedding. How would you go about it? Would you wander down an aisle and grab random flowers, thrusting them into the bouquet in bunches? Would you gather only orange flowers? Would you wait to toss it together haphazardly until the day before the wedding? Or would you take time to research the options? Would you learn about which flowers are most appealing and fragrant?
Wouldn’t you find a way to display them that is well-balanced and pleasant? Perhaps even moving each flower around until the colors are evenly mixed and your result is breathtaking? Finding the correct balance provides the finest product.
This is also true when applied to our lives. Work life balance is the amount of time and energy that is given to each important area, such as work, family, spirituality, or health. When they are not attended to proportionally, you will feel depleted and stressed out. Overfocusing on work will leave less time to spend with your family or exercising. The same is true in reverse – constantly staying out late with friends will cut into your time that should be devoted to sleep, in turn negatively affecting your work performance.
There are many possible indications that you may be suffering from poor work life balance, including:
- Difficulty concentrating — you may not be able to maintain focus on topics that used to engage you
- Feelings of increased stress — stress can have a negative impact on your mood, personality, or even your health
- Decreased job satisfaction — which can manifest as decreased productivity and poor enthusiasm
- Feeling down or anxious — poor balance negatively affects your mental health
- Diminished physical health — perhaps a lack of exercise, insufficient sleep habits, or poor nutrition
- Feelings of burnout — leaving you feeling depleted and unable to accomplish tasks
- Inconsistent moods — perhaps even experiencing outbursts of anger or low energy
The Impact of Work Life Balance
A subpar work life balance will be noticeable across the board, affecting your life in many ways. The impact on your job satisfaction is undeniable. If you find yourself devoting too much time to your job, perhaps answering an evening text from your boss, or checking your email while on vacation, this is a red flag that your work portion may be exaggerated and tipping the scale downward. This will manifest as negative feelings toward your job due to stress, too large of a workload, or perhaps unfair expectations.
When your work satisfaction is deficient, there is no zeal in showing up for your shift and the company is losing out because your productivity level inevitably trends down.
Now imagine if you are feeling stressed and unhappy about work; how will that impact the rest of your life? Most likely, your mood at home will be adversely impacted as well. Stress has a way of creeping into every aspect of your life: it is like a shadow that follows you around, making it hard to enjoy even your time spent away from the office. Long-term stress has been correlated with many unwanted issues, such as exhaustion, anxiety, and even physical ailments.
Burnout can seem like the same thing as stress; however, burnout is a more chronic condition, resulting in detachment and reduced work efficacy. Burnout can be debilitating, leading to psychological disorders and true disruption to your life and your relationships.
We can help you identify if your symptoms are concerning burnout with our simple self-assessment.
6 Effective Ways to Improve Your Work Life Balance
Luckily, improving your work life balance will have inverse effects on every portion of your life. Your interpersonal relationships will blossom, your health will stabilize, and your mood will be so positive that it will shine through, lighting up your face and creating a pleasant aura around you. Your professional performance will soar if you are engaged and focused on your work, drastically improving your job satisfaction. Your ability to cope with stress increases exponentially when your energy stores are not depleted.
According to Business News Daily, a decent work life balance has positive effects on our overall sense of well-being and was an asset to the company as well, creating a “more loyal and productive workforce”. Here we will share the best ways to combat poor work life balance and retake ownership of how we spend our time, creating a fulfilling life for ourselves.
Evaluate where you stand right now.
Is your teeter-totter of life in good balance? Has work stealthily crept into other areas? Have you been neglecting your physical health? When was the last time you went on a date night? What areas of your life may be suffering because of poor work life balance?
Say it with me: Time Management.
This is arguably the most important tip you will find here. We are each given the same limited number of hours in each day. Nothing that we do will change that number, so the importance of our choices on how we devote our most precious resource is immense! Learning to manage our time involves taking an honest inventory of our schedule and the activities that we want to include in it. Every activity that has a positive impact on your life needs to be physically written down in your schedule. This ranges from blocking out time for work, exercise, sleep, tea with your mom, music lessons, reading with your child, or writing the next chapter of your novel.
How good are your time management skills? Find out with our free self-assessment!
Prioritization goes hand in hand with time management.
Often the number of activities we envision completing in one day can be disproportionate to the amount we will accomplish. Various reasons might make this true, such as misjudging how long a task will take or an unanticipated family emergency. For this reason, it can be helpful to prioritize each task on your schedule, identifying how important they each are by numbering them in order. This allows for the least important task to be moved to a later time slot, and may even help you identify a task that may not be worthy of using your energy on when you are stretched thin.
You don’t always have to say yes.
In fact, saying no is an important skill to develop if you would like to keep your sanity. Saying no and setting healthy boundaries will protect you from overextending yourself. This can be applied in both personal and professional arenas. Before giving an answer, take time to evaluate your current list of responsibilities and how adding another task will affect your schedule. If you say yes, that hour you are devoting will be taken away from one of the other items on your schedule.
Identify goals and the steps needed to achieve them.
If you spend off-the-clock hours devoted to work, allowing your family time to be eaten away, you will probably want to focus more time on your family. This is your goal. Perhaps your steps to do so may be to create a routine that allows you to create space between your work and home life. Park at home, take three deep breaths, and leave your phone in your car for the first hour after entering your house. This allows you to completely focus on your family and draw a line in the sand for your work life balance.
Identify a support system to help keep you on the right track.
One option is to create visual reminders for yourself about your intentions. Maybe you have decided to spend more time with your family? Set your phone screensaver with a family photo to keep them in focus throughout your day and motivate you to maintain balance. Or you can tell your best friend to check on your progress every Wednesday. Or try writing down your goals and revisit the paper every week to track your progress.
What do you want for your life?
Are you content with where you are now? Does your current reality leave you feeling stressed, angry, and exhausted?
Instead, envision yourself as happy, fulfilled, and stress-free. This can be attained when you learn to create a proper work life balance. Identifying the parts of your life that you value and where your energy is being overapplied can help you create a blueprint for centering yourself and building the reality that you actually want.
Try our easy assessment to guide you along the first step of your work life balance transformation. It’s available in our free member dashboard (along with many, many more personal development and self-improvement resources)!
