What is a healthy work-life balance?
“Unhealthy work-life balance” is not a trending phrase about something we all feel when we work. It existed since we can’t even remember. And it will persist through the future as we continued to work.
Since Covid-19 has hit the world, you hear this vocabulary more often than you’d like. Especially to the employees working from home, you’ll eventually face burnout in your career.
At the expense of being comfortable in the house, there are some changes that’ll happen in our life. Those changes can be negative too. One example is that some people actually work longer hours than they used to.
As the lines between work and personal experience are blurred, people have a harder time balancing their work and off-work life.
This is because they don’t know when or how to switch to professional mode. It’s a given that then employees can’t maintain a healthy work-life balance in their life while working from home.
For example, a study shows that 66% of employees in the US feel that they don’t have a good work-life balance.
However, you can actually improve on your lifestyle and mindset to counteract this. Here are several tips you can follow to combat this problem and maintain a healthy work-life balance instead.
- Set work hours
- Work in a “workplace”
- Don’t procrastinate and set little goals
- Spare time for relationships and hobbies
- Think about the impact
1. Set work hours
On average, male and female employees work for 8 hours.
Counted that an employee work from Monday to Friday for 8 hours, they should work only up to 42 hours total. If you want to maintain a healthy work-life balance, prioritize working for only 8 hours a day.
This means you’ll want to set some fixed work hours so you’ll never go over time or you’ll do more work without realizing the time. The most common schedule that a normal office worker has for their working hours is from 9 AM to 5 PM.
You can definitely adjust it to your own schedule and life though, as long as you can stick to the hours you set.
By setting work hours, you’ll know when to stop and unplug.
Often times employees feel that because their working at-home schedule is so relaxing, they end up working whenever here and there. This makes them work for more than 42 hours and they can feel more tired instead at the end of the day.
Flexibility in working from home is nice and convenient for many of us, but don’t start being too flexible for yourself until you practically don’t have a work schedule. A little guidance and discipline are needed to maintain a healthy work-life balance.
2. Work in a “workplace”
Just as you need to set work hours, you need to work in a workplace too. You might ask, “But I’m working from home, how do I work in a workplace?” And you’re right.
What we mean here is that you need to work in a place in your house that has a workplace feel. This means staying away from working on your bed or places you usually rest.
It might be tempting to work comfortably on your comfortable bed or sofa while just lying around. But this can slow down your work progress and hinder your motivation in finishing your work.
There are also health issues that you’ll encounter if you keep working on your bed. Study shows that working from your bed can disrupt your work schedule. Plus, you could also get headaches and back problems if you keep working on the bed.
Instead, try working in a studio or an office room or somewhere with proper work setups. With an individual workplace that’s peaceful and quiet, you can focus more easily.
If you don’t have a room intended solely for work, maybe you can try working on your living room, but be sure to sit upright and try to have no one in the room when you’re working. By doing this, you can switch to “work mode” faster because you’re not simply relaxing at home.
It’s healthier too in psychological aspect and physical aspect. Maintaining a healthy work-life balance means that you’ll need to try and separate your work-life from everything else in your life.
3. Don’t procrastinate and set little goals
The effect of flexible remote work is that you’ll find it easy to get cozy. Of course, if your bed and your work are placed side by side, you’ll choose to lie down and sleep instead of working.
But procrastinating is a bad recipe for a healthy work balance. You’ll end up sleeping late because you need to work. Later in the morning and afternoon, you’ll become tired and sleep-deprived, choosing to sleep instead of working. And so the cycle goes on and on.
One cause of procrastinating is thinking of the amount of work that you need to do in the future.
Because you’re overwhelmed by it, you start thinking to do the work later when you’re more ready to take up a lot of work. But this isn’t a good mindset to have if you want to strive for a healthy work-life balance.
Instead of focusing on 2 or 3 or many tasks, try focusing on the one that you have finished at the moment. Setting a little goal to finish one task makes you think that your workload has decreased. Try not to think of other tasks while you’re working on the current one.
By not putting your mind under strain all day, you can overcome your work more easily.
4. Spare time for relationships and hobbies
Yes, remote work makes you work more hours.
That means you’ll be busy and have less time to relax and enjoy yourself. But no matter how busy you are, you still need to take a breather sometimes.
This is one of the upsides of remote work. You can pick up any new hobby you want or spend quality time with your current hobbies. Play games, cook or do sport-related activities in your home.
Working is important and you’re in demand to finish it, but it can be ineffective to work while you’re in burnout.
You can also try to invest more time in your family or friends. While Covid-19 has prevented and decrease people from going out, that doesn’t mean you can have small gatherings of close friends at your house.
Spending time with your loved ones can provide you with comfort and distress you from work. This way, when you do get back to work, you’ll be able to work more smoothly.
5. Think about the impact
A lot of employees who don’t have a healthy work-life balance often don’t think about the impact of it. Let’s think about what will happen when you don’t maintain a healthy work-life balance:
- Revenge bedtime procrastination: This is a real psychological behavior for people who work a lot and don’t have much free time for themselves. They feel that their free time isn’t enough, so they sacrifice their sleep to enjoy some entertainment. By working more hours, you’ll find yourself in this behavior in no time. Revenge bedtime procrastination can lead to extreme impacts like cardiovascular problems or diabetes.
- Health issues: Back problems and headaches are some of the health impacts discussed before. But it’s not just the physical health that’ll be affected by an unhealthy work-life balance. You’re also affecting your mental health. Survey shows that people who are working longer hours are more prone to anxiety and depression compared to others.
- Fatigue and stress: Unhealthy work-life balance leads to fatigue and stress. A moderate amount of stress is needed for productive work. But if you’re too stressed, you can end up not being productive in your work. This leads to more working hours and an unhealthy work-life balance. If this happens regularly, you’ll build up fatigue.
Those are some of the effects of an unhealthy work-life balance. If it never comes across to your mind, try to reflect on it. They’re serious and can be damaging to your life.
That’s why you need to maintain a work-life balance, or you’ll struggle with your life somewhere later. By thinking about the impact, you can actually feel the importance of a work balance. And so, you’ll become more disciplined for yourself to strive for the better.
Takeaways
TLDR; start working at a regular time in a suitable place, be sure to catch a break, and think about the consequences of not maintaining a work-life balance.
And that’s all the tips for you to improve your work-life. While there is no perfect work-life balance, you still can improve yourself to be healthier and happier. Employees are not mindless robots that can take as many hours as they want to work. They need to prioritize themselves and employers need to take care of them.
For employers, attend and cater to your employees. If an employer is more considerate about employees’ work-life balance, employees will feel satisfied and be more productive in their work.
If you’d like to hire employees with remote work condition, you can go to our job seeking platform, 9cv9.
You might also want to read:
4 Tips to Build Effective Company Culture During the Pandemic
