How to Maintain a Work Life Balance – Female Insight

Balance is the word that connects almost everything that we do, intentionally or unintentionally. In today’s world, work patterns revolve to a great extent around the concept of balance. Here is the balance I’ll be talking about between work and life and how to maintain a work life balance. People are getting more engaged, time is getting hectic, and getting a good work-life balance seems like a far-fetched dream. The work form is now not only limited to usual office hours. In the past, when work was manual, getting free time away from work was not hard.

Nowadays, work-life balance can seem like an impossible feat. Today’s technology makes workers available around the clock. Worrying about job loss encourages extended hours. A huge 94% of working professionals reported working more than 45 hours per week, and nearly half said they worked more than 60 hours per week. According to the experts, compounding stress from the never-ending workday is harmful. It can hurt our relationships, health, and overall happiness.

Knowing how to maintain a work life balance is part of your self-care. When manipulating the responsibilities of your workday, relationships with your family members and other loved ones, and home life, work-life balance is a term that makes intuitive sense to many of us, but it is not easy to achieve.

It’s one thing to talk about work-life balance. It’s another way to achieve it. Here are some tips to maintain your work life at work and at home.

How to Maintain a Work Life Balance

First, look at some ways how to maintain a work life balance at home.

1. Communicate boundaries so you can unplug: Do communicate your work hours to your colleagues and customers so that you may have clear boundaries. This will surely include when you will work and when you won’t be able to give a reply. If you want to achieve this, you have to set up an autoresponder to alert those who will contact you by mail that you are offline. This may be to let them know when you’ll respond. It will help you to remove the pressure to keep checking work emails.

2. Spend in a relationship: The absence of strong relationships can increase the risk of premature death from all causes by 50%. This is almost as harmful as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. On the other side, solid bonds and social support can improve health and increase longevity. You make sure to spend your time on the development of a relationship that matters to you. If you took the previous step to unplug, then you’ll be able to give more care to the people you spend your time with.
3. Make a schedule for family time. Everyone in your family needs to make this time a priority if they want to. All of your family members need to decide to take the necessary steps to carve out this time. You can also use this time to contact family members or other loved ones who live far away from you. Chunk some time that’s entirely devoted to your family.
4. Prioritize your quality time: Identify what’s truly important to you rather than extending yourself so thin that nothing feels satisfying. Values exploring your ideas may be able to be helpful ways to clarify and clear this for yourself. See what you learn, and take an honest look at how you spend your time. Are the activities and relationships in your life attractive and satisfying? With this data in hand, tell yourself where you’ll devote your time. Make sure to prioritise great-value relationships and activities.
5. Request for Help: High-achieving professionals are often guilty of taking everything on themselves. They don’t want to “bother” anyone by requesting help. You need to get a habit of asking for help when you are looking for solutions on how to maintain a work life balance.

How to Maintain a Work Life Balance at Work

Now, let’s see some ways you can maintain your work-life balance at home.

1. Say “no”: Acquiring how to say no can be one of the toughest soft skills for any dedicated professional to learn and put into practice. It is a main part of setting boundaries .
2. Need breaks? You can take a 30-second microbreak that can improve your concentration, reduce stress, keep you feeling engaged, and make your work feel more enjoyable. It’s very important to be careful of this when you’re working from home. According to the study, taking a 15-minute break every 75–90 minutes can allow your brain to consolidate and retain learning.
3. Use your lunch break: If you have a lunch break at your workplace, it’s your right to use it on how to maintain a work life balance. It means you shouldn’t likely always eat at your table and work through lunch. You can use this time to enjoy your meal peacefully. You can also do short meditations or exercises like breathing exercises if your stress level is high or you have chronic stress.
4. Having flexibility: Having an open and honest conversation about your needs and wants and those of your employer and crew can lead to productive solutions. This can include flexitime, a compressed workweek schedule, job sharing, and more creative options on how to maintain a work life balance.
5. Make health a priority: Knowing the importance of maintaining your mental and physical health as well as your emotional well-being is always the first step towards making it a priority in your life. There are some considered habits to build simple, supportive actions into your day. Consider habits like: exercise; daily meditation or yoga; social connection; and using your paid time off.
6. Drill self-compassion: It is one of the most important ways to get a sense of work-life balance and find a sense of balance is to let go of perfectionism. The method of perfectionism may have enjoyed some success during the institution and early career. But the stress is caused gather over time. The stress on your system and emotional resources get high as our responsibilities get high. Everyone goes with struggles and you aren’t constantly going to get it right. Knowing this truth can create a shift towards a more compassionate growth and learning approach to work or life and help you on how to maintain a work life balance.

The Key Advantages of Having Work-Life Balance

The advantages of work-life balance are far-reaching and extend to both you and your company.

1. You may have fewer health issues. According to the research, overwork and long hours can have several consequences on humans, including fatigue, poor health, and a negative impact on relationships. Also people who work more than three to four hours of overtime have 50% higher chances of getting risk of heart-related problems whereas who don’t work overtime is having very less chances. Moreover, working any overtime is linked to minor general health problems. Working overtime is associated with: neck and muscle discomfort; higher on-the-job injury rates; unhealthy weight improvement; an increase in alcohol consumption; and an increased likelihood of smoking.
2. Higher productivity: If you spend too much time working, it can directly correlate to a loss of productivity and effectiveness. According to the research, after employees work 50 hours or more, their output drops dramatically. Whereas those who work more than 70 hours a week don’t produce anything more with the additional 15 hours.
3. Less burnout: It is a form of mental exhaustion. It can also be a sign that your health at work isn’t perfect. According to the study, there is a risk of burnout whenever the job environment and the worker are out of balance. When your work and life balance with one another in accord, burnout isn’t as much of a fear.
4. Extra mindfulness: it is the ability to uphold your awareness and focus on what you’re doing at any given moment. An example of this is mindful breathing. However, gaining mindfulness is tough. Especially if you’re unfocused by other commitments and concerns.

In the period of working, you can achieve more mindfulness when you’re given the flexibility to manage your personal commitment while you achieve your share of the workload.

Conclusion: Making work-life balance and integration a priority is a continuing and fluid process. You’ll always be learning and adapting as your interests and circumstances change over time. It’ll need a key skill like time management skills.

Let it be fun! And don’t forget to sometimes revisit your priorities to see what’s changed. You’ll want to measure whether your priorities continue to line up with how you’re spending your time and energy.

There is no magical formula to discover balance; you may look very different from that of your co-employer or friends. It’s up to you to set your priorities and create a lifestyle balance that works best for your necessities. Think of the fact that your work-life balance is the result of your own choices.

Now that you understand the value of work-life balance, it’s time to start creating a more balanced life for yourself. The good and the bad start with your mentality. Because your outlook is what empowers you to say “no”, prioritise what’s most important and create the balanced lifestyle you want.

If the work you do makes it unbearable to find balance, perhaps it’s time to make a variation. From time to time, achieving work-life balance can involve making a difficult decision, like leaving your job for one that allows for better balance.