Making sure you allot the right amount of time for work and for personal life sounds simple, but it’s easy to get caught up in a project or trying to impress your boss and work far more hours than you should. Before you know it, you feel burnt out and used up.
What Are the Benefits of a Work-Life Balance?
Zippia recently took a look at work-life balance statistics. They stated about 77% of employees have experienced burnout at least one time in their careers. Some of the barriers they found to a healthy work-life balance included personal perfectionism, bosses and supervisors, difficult projects and company culture.
Here are some ways you can set a work-life routine that ensures you stay focused both at home and work.
1. Set a Schedule
Think about how many hours you realistically need for your job or business to thrive. If you put in 70 hours each week but are only productive for 20, you may be setting yourself up for burnout later down the line.
Think about how much time you need for relaxation, family activities and your extended circle. Build your work schedule around the rest of your life and not the other way around. When you do work, you’ll be more focused and get more done. Write out your schedule so you can review it from time to time.
2. Get Paid What You’re Worth
Studies show about 71% of workers are now remote. While it saves on commute time, employees may also feel they better perform high or risk losing the perks of working from home. About 10% of those remote workers say they put in 20 hours or more of free work every week. Employees feel they have to pick up the slack and keep things performing at a high level.
Unfortunately, it’s horrible for work-life balance. Talk to your employer about how they might compensate you before agreeing to extra work outside the scope of your regular duties. It’s easy to throw the harder tasks on the worker who doesn’t complain and gets things done. Don’t be the person that gets taken advantage of, even if it’s your own company.
3. Set Boundaries
Set some personal boundaries about what’s acceptable to you and your routine. Perhaps your child has an activity once a week and you’d like to attend. Block out those hours as unavailable for anything but your family. Maybe working any holidays is a deal breaker for you. Make it clear you won’t work holidays or which ones, but come up with alternatives to get last-minute projects done in a timely manner outside those days.
4. Recognize Burnout
One of the biggest problems with Type A, hard working employees is the number of them experiencing burnout. People can only put in 110% for so long before they run out of steam.
About 50% of Americans fail to use all of their paid time off each year. One way to make sure you keep your work-life routine in place is to schedule regular days off. Take bank holidays. Plan a full week for vacation, even if you stay at home.
Recognize when your stress levels rise so you can take a break.
5. Learn to Delegate
If you want to have a good work-life balance, you must learn to delegate the tasks someone else can do in your place. Some of the more creative aspects of your job, you must focus on, but do you really need to type up notes from a meeting or print and mail letters?
Hire help, get an assistant or figure out how to delegate repetitive and menial tasks to either artificial intelligence or interns.
Reflect on What’s Important
Set an appointment on your calendar to do a bit of reflection every quarter. Is your work-life balance still where it should be? Have you let any bad habits creep in? You may want to ask your friends and family how you’re doing at being present in your day-to-day life. Getting feedback is one of the best ways to tweak your work-life balance routine.
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