10 Tips to Have a Better Work-Life Balance

If you are feeling like you are drowning at work with nothing left in the tank by the end of your workday, you may be lacking in establishing an effective work-life balance. Consider restructuring your routines and priorities to have enough energy for all your personal and professional demands. Your health directly influences your performance and your relationships. 

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How to Have a Better Work-Life Balance

Work-life balance is not a new concept, which simply means carving out an appropriate time for your professional and personal life, but what constitutes “balance” for one may not be the same for someone else. An individual’s ability to balance work and life is affected by factors relating to an individual’s workplace and working conditions. The level of flexibility and quantity of hours worked, sick and holiday leave provisions, and availability of support structures within the workplace, says Harriet Chan, Co-founder and Marketing Director of CocoFinder.

A Commitment of the Employee and Employer

To most effectively achieve work-life balance, a collaboration between employer and employee is essential. It is the employer’s responsibility to offer working conditions that do not hinder the employee's health and the employee’s responsibility to manage their time. Considering an individual spends the vast majority of the day working, fostering healthy lifestyles is in the interest of the employee and the employer. 

As an employer, one of the best ways to promote a healthy work-life balance is to educate employees about it. Offering seminars on the importance of work-life balance and things they can do to achieve it, says Chan. Educating your employees will give them the tools to help themselves, which is a crucial step. 

10 Best Tips to Have a Better Work-Life Balance 

1. Manage Your Time

As you begin your journey to better personal and professional balance, you will want to gather your own baseline data. Analyze your current calendar and to-do list to see which tasks take the most of your time. If you do not use a formal calendar or daily checklist, this would be the perfect time to implement one! 

You will want to prioritize your tasks and determine where you have time gaps for personal time. Do you typically spend them scrolling through social media? Fill that time with a productive personal goal. Visualizing your current schedule will provide clarity in what causes your current workplace's woes. 

Take it from Edward Mellett, Founder and co-founder of Wikijob. He suggests analyzing your current circumstances is the first step toward living a balanced life. Keep a one-week journal of everything you do, including professional and personal interests. This information will serve as a wake-up call, revealing how you spend your time and where you waste it.

CEO of CoinPayments, Jason Butcher, also emphasizes this approach. Rank things in order of importance from urgent to unimportant. This will free up some of your time, so you are not wasting it working on things that are not your current priority. It will also help you become more productive at completing your urgent and important tasks. A reminder we can all appreciate, work will always be there, and there is no need to stress out and work overly long hours every day. If it can’t be done today, it can be done tomorrow, says Butcher.

2. Determine Your Priorities

While you manage your schedule or begin to make one, think about everything you may need to complete in the next few weeks to begin narrowing your priorities. Achieving your goals will not happen passively, and you need to make a concerted effort, but know that everything you set out to accomplish in one day may not happen. Aside from just thinking about all your tasks at work, what do you need to accomplish when you leave, or have there been aspects that you have neglected?

If you have not gone to the doctor in some years, you may find that on your least busy day, you have time to take the leap and schedule a few appointments. Or, you may see that you have an opening to finally try that workout class that’s been all the rave. Perhaps you realize you have a family birthday coming up that you had lost track of. To keep yourself organized, consider the following general priorities to see where you may be lacking:

1. Personal Health
2. Personal Growth
3. Personal Relationships
4. Friendships
5. Family
6. Finances
7. Religion and Spirituality
8. Recreation
9. Occupation