5 Revolutionary Tips for Improving Work Life Balance

Interested in improving work life balance? This post is all about setting boundaries at work and prioritizing personal time throughout your career.

Improving work life balance can be challenging. The average American with a full-time job works around 8 hours per day. Once you subtract time to sleep and commute to and from work, most full-time workers only have 7 hours of personal time per workday.

As working professionals, we understand that grind culture is the norm in many work environments. If your boss is hyper-focused on productivity, you probably spend way more than 8 hours per day on work-related activities. And you probably have even less personal time.

We are going to give you seven simple ways you can immediately start to protect your free time and work smart (not hard) at work.

After implementing this advice, you will be on your way to avoiding overwork in your career.

Keep reading for tips about improving work life balance so you can have more time to rest and enjoy your life outside of work.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Tips for Improving Work Life Balance

1. Write Down Why You Want A Healthy Work Life Balance

2. Decide When and How You Will Work

3. Only Work Within Your Boundaries

4. Plan How You Will Communicate Your Boundaries

5. Take All of Your Vacation and Sick Days

TIPS FOR IMPROVING WORK LIFE BALANCE

1. Write Down Why You Want A Healthy Work Life Balance

Our first tip for creating a healthy work life balance is to list the activities you want to do when you’re not at work. Knowing what you want to do in your free time will motivate you to make decisions that limit the amount of time you spend working.

Try to think about activities you wouldn’t be able to do if you worked overtime. And consider actually writing them down so you don’t forget.

2. Decide When and How You Will Work

You can’t set boundaries when you don’t know what your boundaries are.

That’s why one of the most important ways to improve your work life balance is to decide how much you want to work. Ask yourself how many hours you want to spend working per day and per week. You should also think about which hours you want to work and whether you will do tasks outside of your job description.

This step will be easier if your job sets your hours. For example, if your boss requires you to work from 9am to 5pm, those 8 hours will make up your work boundaries.

3. Only Work Within Your Boundaries

The next of our work life balance examples involves refusing to work outside of the boundaries you have set.

This step can be challenging because workplace norms often make employees feel powerless. Our employers control whether we have a job, how much we get paid, and the assignments we’re asked to work on.

However, we get to decide whether we work outside of our contractual work hours. Even if our job’s workplace culture encourages people to work late or on weekends, we can choose to work only on weekends. Just make sure you stick to what your employment contract requires.

4. Plan How You Will Communicate Your Boundaries

The key to successfully improving work life balance is to plan ahead. It’s especially important to plan to communicate your boundaries.

Since we live a world dominated by hustle and grind culture, you can expect to get pushback for strictly protecting your personal time. This is why you need to decide how you will respond when people push your boundaries…before they actually push your boundaries.

Start by thinking about what you will say if someone asks you to work late or on weekends. Consider using some version of the following language: “I do not have capacity to complete this [tonight/over the weekend], but I can complete this task [insert reasonable deadline].”

You should also think about how you want to communicate your boundaries. Do you want to respond via email or schedule a quick chat? Would you prefer to respond immediately or give yourself time to process and analyze the situation?

Planning your response ahead of time will help you feel confident when you challenge expectations that violate your boundaries.

5. Take All of Your Vacation and Sick Days

Unfortunately, studies show that only 49% of people normally take all of their vacation time, and almost 70% of people use their phones or laptops to work while they’re supposed to be taking time off.

But if you want to improve your work life balance, you have to maximize your free time. And you get the most personal time when you use all of the vacation and sick days your employer allows you to take.

That’s why our last tip is to plan out when you will use your paid time off, including regular mental health days.