9 tips & tricks to restore your work-life balance

The pandemic has caused a tectonic shift in the way many of us in the business winning community have worked over the past two years, through either being encouraged to or forced to work from home for extended periods.

Talking with many of our clients to hear about their personal experiences over this period doing so, for many it has been a positive one due primarily to the elimination of:

• Their daily commute to the office and time saved from that to do other more enjoyable things
• The time spent travelling domestically and internationally for work and the tiredness and stress that comes with it and missing family and friends
• Distractions that typically take place in an office environment through either background noise or random conversations. While most have missed the personal interactions from being in an office, many have said that they have been more focused and productive working from home.

On the downside, the biggest challenge that the vast majority of people have shared with me about working from home is the further erosion of their work-life balance and wellness. This has been due to the blurring of where the working day actually starts and ends.

This seems to be a particular challenge for those working in multinational organisations where meetings are held through Teams, Zoom and other video calling platforms in time zones that don’t necessarily work well for those of us that reside in the Asia Pacific region.

While this technology and our various devices have been a huge asset in keeping us all connected, they have served to promote an environment, consciousness or expectation where many feel compelled to be ‘on’ all of the time at work and obligated to respond to mails at all hours of the day and night.

Is this you?

• Do you find yourself scrolling through your work emails while watching TV or while talking with other members of your household (if you have some)?

• Do you send emails on weekends in an effort to clear your backlog and give you some breathing space for the week ahead?

• Do you find it a struggle to ignore your phone and work emails?

• Are you able to be ‘present’ with those you care about and focused on them rather than focusing on the screen on your device?

• If you are now working the hybrid model of working sometime in the office and sometime from home when you have been in the office for the day, do you still find yourself working on emails when you get home?

If any of this resonates with you, it’s time to take stock and do somethings that will help you regain your work-life balance by creating some clear boundaries around work time and non-work time. In doing so that you can then relax, unwind and joy more quality time with the people you care about.

What follows is a checklist of 9 ideas for you to consider implementing if you haven’t already done so:

• DON'T GET STUCK SCROLLING: If you are using your phone as your alarm clock, when you turn off the alarm, resist the urge to start scrolling on your phone while you are still in bed.  Go get showered, have some breakfast and then get ‘game ready’ for work, starting at a time that you would normally be doing if you were in the office.

• TURN OFF NAGGING NOTIFICATIONS: Whenever possible, turn off all the alert notifications that you have set up for either emails, news or anything else.  Eliminating all the ‘pings’ and ‘dings’ in your life will reduce the potential for you to keep switching between activities and the angst that comes with it.
• PRODUCTIVITY PLANNING: Diarise specific chunks of time each day to deal with your emails rather than responding to them on an ad-hoc basis as and when they come in. This way you will have more time to invest focusing on the more productive and enjoyable aspects of your job.
• BRING BACK BOUNDARIES: Resist the urge to respond to emails before or after normal workday ours and certainly on weekends. Ask yourself honestly, is there anything so urgent in this request that I have to respond to now?  Can it wait? Responding regularly to emails after hours creates the precedent/expectation that you are reachable at that time, so make sure you don’t fall into that trap.
• SIGNITURE STATEMENTS: Include in your email signature a statement such as  ‘I do not respond to emails outside of normal office hours. If, however, your matter is urgent, please text me on 0400 XXXX XXXX’.
• SEPARATE HOME AND OFFICE SPACE: Do you work at home in the same space, even if that is from your kitchen or dining room table, that way the rest of your home is treated as ‘off limits’ from work.
• GET YOUR BLOOD PUMPING: Make it a point to get up from your desk every hour for a few minutes to freshen up and improve your blood circulation. This will also help eliminate the online fatigue that comes from attending endless Teams, Zoom and other types of video calls.
• MAKE TIME FOR THE LITTLE THINGS: When your working day is done, do some activity that transitions you back into your home life, just like you would be doing if you were commuting home.  Take a walk, read a book or whatever else might bring you joy each day.  Make it a fixed routine.
• BE PRESENT: If you can do, put your phone / devices in the bedroom or your home office so you don’t have access to them while having dinner or sitting in your lounge room with your family, if you live with one. Enjoy the sensation of being ‘in the present’ rather than scrolling on your phone and talking with people you care about at the same time.

I’ve tried many of these tips myself and whilst I am not perfect, they have significantly helped me in enhancing my sense of wellbeing while working from home and helped me ‘cut off’ from work when I should be doing so.

The remaining challenge I have yet to solve is finding a refrigerator with a time lock on it.

Having piled on the kilos through ‘grazing’ throughout the course of each day, I am now about to refocus on the next phase of securing a better work-life balance i.e. through devoting time to exercising some more and all the good stuff that comes from that.

Life is a journey, travel it well.