Most people know that work-life balance is important, but achieving it is often easier said than done.
If you’re looking for work-life balance hacks, try these tips from productivity experts and one historical figure.
[Related:The Best Companies for Work-Life Balance]
1. Don’t Think About Work and Life as a Balancing Act
One of the biggest productivity mistakes people make is assuming that a work-life balance is attainable, says Diane Rosen, a professional executive coach, attorney and principal at Compass Consultants, a business and human resources consultancy in New York City.
In other words, you should think of work and life as intermingling. They are part of one whole instead of two distinct halves.
“It’s more manageable to think about how to make your work and life work together rather than seeing them as separate activities,” Rosen says.
She says that there will be times when your life will overtake your work. And there will be times when your work will overtake your life. If you accept that, you may reduce the anxiety that you aren’t living your best life on a daily basis, according to Rosen, who says that’s where constantly mapping out your calendar months in advance would help.
“Planning ahead takes some of the stress out of trying to make everything balance day-to-day,” Rosen says.
2. Set Some Ground Rules
Establish some work-life balance policies upfront such as no working over the weekend or no checking your work email after 6 p.m.
“Ironically, all of this technology has led, in some people in some organizations, to think they have to be ‘on’ all the time, and go from one meeting to another because it’s so easy to schedule it,” says Bob Pozen, author of “Extreme Productivity: Boost Your Results, Reduce Your Hours” and senior lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sloan School of Management.
“You have to have ground rules,” Pozen says. Ideally, you’ll have an employer or manager who sets good ground rules. But if they don’t, he suggests finding some allies at work, coming up with ground rules and presenting them to your employer. If you’re concerned that your boss won’t take kindly to this strategy, Pozen says, a lot of companies these days recognize that work-life balance is important and may be receptive to your ideas.
In any case, it can only help your work-life balance if you set realistic and reasonable parameters for yourself that you’re not going to work more than a certain number of hours a week.
Without your ground rules, you’re going to be far more likely to find yourself working voluntarily on a weekend because you never got into the habit of setting reasonable limits.
[Related:What Is a Toxic Work Environment — and How Can I Avoid It?]
3. Don’t Accept Every Meeting That Comes Your Way
Pointless meetings can serve as a distraction and make you work less efficiently, allowing work to bleed into your personal life.
Before a meeting, Pozen suggests asking the meeting organizer for the meeting agenda. If there isn’t one, “that may tell you a lot,” Pozen says. If there is, you may learn that there’s not much reason for you to attend. You may be able to persuade whoever is hosting it that you don’t need to be there, which may free up your work time so you can leave work in time to see your family at dinner.
4. Do a Time Audit
“It’s remarkable how many people don’t know how they are spending their time,” says Renee Fry, founder and CEO of Gentreo, an estate planning website, and an assistant teacher of productivity classes at MIT.
Her students, who are in the corporate sector, “know they are incredibly busy, working long hours and trying to find time for family, but they can’t tell us what they are working to accomplish,” Fry says. “People just know they have lots of meetings, emails and Slack messages to respond to.”
Take some time to look at your calendar from the last several months. Knowing what you’ve been up to may help you figure out how to fill your time going forward.
“Knowing your priorities is crucial and saying no when meetings and more don’t match to your goals is something more need to feel empowered to do,” Fry says.
5. Stop Working in the Middle of a Task
Author Ernest Hemingway had a neat trick that he wrote about in a 1935 issue of Esquire. He wrote that whenever a young writer asked him how much they should write in a day, he would reply with this: “The best way is always to stop when you are going good and when you know what will happen next. If you do that every day when you are writing a novel, you will never be stuck.”
If you’re writing a white paper, memo, brief, proposal to a client or anything else that doesn’t come easily, you may be better off stopping when you’re on a streak and continuing with it later. It’s generally going to be easier to continue or finish a project than start it.
[Related:How to Ask for a Leave of Absence From Work (With Examples)]
6. Don’t Multitask
Numerous research reports have shown that multitasking doesn’t make people more efficient or better workers.
Arguably, multitasking makes you less productive, which means you’re going to get less done during your work and home hours. That will increase the chances that those two worlds will continually collide with each other — instead of peacefully co-existing.
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6 Work-Life Balance Hacks originally appeared on usnews.com
Update 12/20/23: This story was published at an earlier date and has been updated with new information.
