7 Tips to Manage Your Work-Life Balance
It’s easy for our lives to become overwhelmed by work. Finding that perfect balance is a challenge for all of us. Follow these tips to tip the scale in your favor.
Listener Tom writes in:
“I work 10-7, often later, plus at least parts of nearly every weekend. To that, add a 30-minute commute each way, and I can barely fit in basic life tasks like laundry, going to the post office, and paying bills, let alone having a personal life. I used to love what I do; now I hate it. How can I fit life in around my job?”
Tom, Tom, Tom. You’re the victim of the 21st century. We’re so glad to have jobs at all that we pretty much put up with job situations that suck. First, make sure you’ve read my previous articles about how to set boundaries at work and how to balance work and life. We’re going to build on those today.
Here are 7 tips to help achieving work life balance:
Tip #1: Budget Your Time
We’re taught to budget our money and spend it wisely, but we’re not taught to budget our time. And while you can earn more money, you can’t get more time. When your number is up, it’s up.
A so-called work life balance is simply deciding how much of your non-replaceable time you’re going to spend working (including your commute), and how much you’re reserving for your actual life – the part that matters. I reserve 3.5 hours on alternate Saturdays for my personal life. I hope you do better.
Tip #2: Choose Your Risk Level
You’re probably already scared. “What if I have to work late some evening?” you ask, breaking out into a sweat. Well, the answer is that you don’t, unless it’s super-duper-important. And if you do, you skip out of work early later in the week or month to make up for those hours. Most businesses don’t give you extra money without expecting extra work or extra quality, there’s no reason the standards for yourself should be lower.
“But I’ll get fired!” you cry. Or, “The company will always favor someone who sacrifices their personal life.” Maybe…
Tip #3: Face the Reality, Not Your Fears
Those fears could be true. In that case, you have a choice to make: What’s more important, your job or your life? Whenever I ask this, people look at me like I’m crazy. They think the answer is obvious. In America, the obvious answer is “your job.” In other countries (where they have siestas), the obvious answer is “your life.” The answer, my friend, is not obvious at all.
Before you indulge your fear, though, look for evidence. In most workplaces, it’s hard enough to find an example of someone fired for any reason. People who put in a solid 8 hours but refuse to work weekends probably don’t get fired. They get laid off, of course, but so do all high-performers, to pay for the executive bonus pool. But fired for anything related to job performance? Not likely. Chances are your fears have no basis in fact.
Tip #4: Less is Really More
Working your crazy hours probably isn’t productive. Work more, sacrifice your life, and you get stressed. If your job demands creativity and problem-solving, you’ll tank your work quality by working 24/7. If your job is people interaction, you’ll bite the heads off customers. And if your job involves physical labor, like cleaning the store when you close at night, you’ll be sloppy and physically weaker. You might even slip a disk as you bend down to pick up the remains of a decapitated customer.
I wrote an entire article on the myth of working long hours. The stress of long hours reduces productivity enough to cancel any benefit of the extra hours. You do best by working fewer, higher-quality hours.
Tip #5: Talk to Your Boss
If you have a strong relationship with your boss, it’s worth a serious conversation to scale back your hours or your time commitment. Start by saying, “I want to do a good job. The stress of no life is making it hard for me to function well.” Unless your boss is an ogre, you should have room to negotiate. If your boss is an ogre, it’s time for a new boss. Transfer to a new group, transfer to a new company, or replace your boss with an identical-looking robot that obeys your every command.
Tip #6: Schedule Your Personal Life First
My favorite do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do technique is to schedule your personal life before scheduling work. Then ask how you can meet your work goals in the leftover time in your schedule. “I plan to have dinner at 6:30pm every night with my husband, wife, spousal equivalent, children, or polyamorous family units. How can I still get my work done?” You might have ideas like working a half day at the office and a half day from home later in the evening. I used to carpool to work. I would say “I must leave at 5 pm to catch my carpool.” No one ever complained. We just got stuff done by 5pm. The carpool schedule limited the workday, not the other way around.
Tip #7: Reconsider That Commute
Think about this: Your 30-minute commute is taking up 6 work-weeks of time each year. That’s a month and a half! And it’s coming out of your personal time, not your work time. Move closer, work from home, or find a way to do something useful as you drive, such as have your cell phone read your work email to you. I hear they do that these days. Or listen to informative, helpful podcasts (ahem!). Or find radio stations and/or CDs that offer educational programs which might actually help you in your work.
It’s scary and hard to reclaim our lives from overwork. But the only one who can do it is you. Decide how much time you’ll work and draw the line, firmly. Talk to your boss, schedule your personal life first, get real about your fears, and judge your performance based on results—true productivity—not hours.
Work Less, Do More, and have a Great Life!
Image courtesy of Shutterstock
About the Author
Stever Robbins was the host of the podcast Get-it-Done Guy from 2007 to 2019. He is a graduate of W. Edward Deming’s Total Quality Management training program and a Certified Master Trainer Elite of NLP. He holds an MBA from the Harvard Business School and a BS in Computer Sciences from MIT.
