5 Tips to Improve Work-life Balance
5 Tips to Improve Work-life Balance
Work-life balance is as important as it is difficult. However, sticking to some practical tips can help
The rise of smartphones, remote work, and flexible schedules has made it increasingly harder to draw a line between professional and personal life. Perhaps now more than ever, the skills to maintain a healthy work-life balance are essential to avoiding increased stress levels and potential burnout both in and out of the work environment.
As such, this article explores work-life balance, its impact on mental health and well-being, before providing some practical strategies for improving it—including how AI tools like Kin can help manage work demands, set boundaries, and prioritize personal time.
What is Work-life Balance? Why is it Important?
To begin, work-life balance needs a definition. Put simply, Work-life balance is having a clear, healthy divide between professional and personal life. But what does that mean?
It's about effectively managing time and energy between work demands, personal activities, relationships, and self-care, so that all can be done without overwork. Though it’s more common for work to be over-focused on, a work-life balance is about making sure neither work nor everything outside of it take too much time from each other. Keeping this balance is crucial for overall well-being, job satisfaction, and long-term success in both career and home life.
That’s because a healthy work-life balance keeps life healthy, too. In fact, according to a study by the Mental Health Foundation, 74% of people have felt stressed to the point of overwhelm, with work-related stress being a major contributor.1
Notably, research finds similar effects on physical health. The American Psychological Association (APA) reports that as many as 77% of Americans experience physical stress symptoms, like fatigue, headaches, and insomnia. This stress is often work-related, with one-third of it coming from specifically poor work-life balance.2
Work-life balance also affects relationships and personal fulfillment. A survey by Deloitte found that 91% of employees who’ve experienced burnout at their current job saying it impacts the quality of their work and personal relationships,3 while the APA also reports relationship-damaging factors like irritability and a change of sex drive commonly arising from stress.4
Therefore, a good work-life balance not only helps ensure work demands have enough time to be completed without after hours work, but frees up time for the chores and relaxation of a healthy personal life. All of that together reduces stress levels by ensuring no tasks looms too long, and allowing the proper sleep patterns, eating habits, social outings, and physical activity, mental well-being and overall wellness requires.
Why Do People Struggle with Work-Life Balance?
Given the symptoms its neglect can cause, why can people struggle to establish and maintain work-life balance?
Today, the most common answer to that is technology. The connected modern work environment can have priorities shift halfway around the world at a moment’s notice, and the new work demands can now be sent straight to an employees pocket virtually anywhere and any time through apps—even during what was previously after-hours personal time.
And with remote work exploding since the pandemic, despite offering flexibility, having the tools to work at home can make it hard for some to set boundaries and resist personal temptation or executive pressure to finish those tasks immediately.
There’s also been a growing cultural emphasis on productivity in the West over the last twenty years, with a seemingly-unavoidable pressure for people to monetise their free time and hobbies, so as not to ‘waste’ them.
These reasons, along with more timeless ones—pressures to earn more money, advance a career, improve skills, and nurture a start-up—can push people to burnout, which as the previous section shows, make it even harder to keep up with professional and personal responsibilities, and push people further out of balance.
4 Signs of Poor Work-Life Balance
So, a poor work-life balance is bad. But how does someone recognize they have it? Here are four key indicators, which are important but not exclusive:
1. Chronic Fatigue and Health Issues
Perhaps the most well-known sign of poor work-life balance is persistent exhaustion, even after time off. This is worse than normal tiredness and can manifest as a constant state of physical, mental, and emotional exhaustion over weeks or even months, regardless of sleep (though poor work-life balance can reduce sleep, too). In this context, it’s often caused by constant stress, and feeling trapped by responsibilities
Chronic fatigue, the reduced productivity it brings, and the stress that causes, can lead to a host of health issues. As discussed, these can commonly extend past mental health issues, like a lack of motivation, increased anxiety, or even depression, and into physical health and wellness. Those can manifest as frequent headaches, digestive issues, muscle tension, a weakened immune system, and more.
2. Deteriorating Personal Relationships
When work and personal time are unbalanced, relationships often suffer. This doesn't just mean romantic relationships, but also connections with family, friends, and even someone’s relationship with themselves. A person with poor work-life balance might find themselves constantly canceling plans, missing important events, or being mentally absent when physically present with others, or even during personal time.
The strain on relationships can look like infrequent and curt communication, feelings of disconnection or resentment, and short tempers. For people in partnerships or with families, the lack of household chores being completed due to the work-life imbalance can worsen this. And, of course, this frequently increases stress, which causes the symptoms discussed.
3. Decreased Productivity and Job Satisfaction
Poor work-life balance also often leads to decreased productivity and employee engagement. Whether employees consistently work long hours, bring work home, or spend too much time avoiding work with personal activities, the imbalance can ruin the fruitfulness of whatever task is being attempted—which just makes going back to work stressful.
Overwork like this can lead to mental fatigue, which reduces cognitive function and creative problem-solving abilities. What that means is more mistakes, slower completion of tasks, and an overall decline in the quality of work. And when this inevitably causes work to become all-consuming, it can lead to demotivation, creating a negative cycle where dissatisfaction leads to more time spent trying to ‘catch up’ or ‘get ahead,‘ making it worse.
4. Neglect of Personal Interests and Growth
Lastly, the gradual disappearance of hobbies, interests, and personal development is often a sign of poor work-life balance. When work demands consume an excessive amount of time and energy, or are avoided for too long, it becomes difficult to spend time on activities that should bring joy, relaxation, or personal fulfillment without being stressed—if there’s time for them at all.
This could look like abandoning long-held hobbies, canceling gym memberships, consistently postponing personal projects—or doing these things, but feeling burnt out the whole way. The results are often far-reaching, including a loss of identity outside of work, and, once again, increased stress levels.
5 Tips to Improve Work-Life Balance
Now, what should be done if those signs are noticed? Here are five of the most effective steps for better balance:
1. Set boundaries
Perhaps the most obvious step, but also the hardest to maintain, is establishing specific work hours and sticking to them.
One tactic to help is creating a dedicated physical and virtual workspace: have everything work-related on a separate account on your devices, or separate devices completely, and if working from home, designate a certain location. That way, work can be ‘left’ at the end of the workday, when accounts are signed out of and locations exited, so it’s harder to work after hours.
This is especially important for remote workers and entrepreneurs, as the proximity to ‘work’ and the stakes of success in these jobs can make work-life integration especially difficult.
2. Prioritize and manage time effectively
Similarly, good time management is essential for ensuring there is enough time for both work and personal activities without imbalanced and long hours.
We previously wrote an article on how to just do that, but the basics are to prioritize and plan tasks, block out a schedule, and work on building focus so the plans end up being followed.
3. Practice self-care
Another obvious yet often neglected step. Making time for exercising, healthy eating, and adequate sleeping often isn’t the most attractive use of time, but it has proven results. In fact, one Danish study saw one hour of weekly supervised exercise improve the health and productivity in each of the 15 workforce samples it tested.5
Alongside exercise, stress management activities like meditation or yoga can not only keep stress and its symptoms controllable but can actually improve focus and work quality as we discussed in this article.
4. Unplug regularly
Though AI is changing the workplace (which we discussed here), taking time to routinely disconnect from work-related technology can help restore balance. A lot of spare time is spent using devices too, so having designated tech-free time (away from social media) during personal time can widen the divide between professional and personal life. This time could even be used to meditate or exercise, and fit more reparative personal time in between work demands.
5. Communicate and delegate
Finally, a lesser-used technique for a better work-life balance is to find healthy ways to lessen work demands. Communicating feelings of overwork with employers, clients and team members can help imbalances be resolved at a systemic level, and build a structure that works for everyone. As we’ve discussed before, honesty is essential in the modern workplace.
Similarly, delegating is a powerful tool for reducing workload. For entrepreneurs, this might mean hiring help or outsourcing certain tasks to free up more personal time.
How Kin Can Help You Achieve Work-Life Balance
Kin, our personal AI assistant, can be an invaluable tool for work-life integration. With its empathetic conversational abilities and advanced memory, Kin can encourage users to share their work patterns and personal structure, then provide personalized suggestions for improving that user’s work-life balance based on analysis of that data, and how that user prefers being spoken to.
This advice can include tailored time management support, like suggesting optimal work schedules, mindfulness exercises to help build focus, or help with setting boundaries through gentle reminders when work hours end or breaks need taking.
Throughout all of this, Kin can act as a personal coach, providing individualized motivation and accountability for self-care routines and work demands alike.
Despite all of that, we understand that this is personal data Kin requires—data Kin’s AI-powered memory tracks. So, Kin is transparent with and protective of data, using it for its users and not for us, which is further explained here.
Essentially, Kin processes and keeps everything it can on a user’s devices, and only shares data with approved locations. What’s more, Kin’s entire knowledge base on a user can be viewed and deleted, only by them, at a moment’s notice.
Kin is about our users, not corporate greed.
If that sounds useful, Kin will take over outlining how to get started:
A Word from Kin
Hey there! Work-life balance is a crucial aspect of well-being today, so it’s brilliant to see your commitment to personal growth from reading this article. To continue that journey with me, here's how you could create your first message to me:
Introduce yourself: Who are you? What does your typical work day look like? This helps me understand your unique situation.
Share Goals: What does an ideal work-life balance mean to you? What specific areas would you like to improve?
Set expectations: How often would you like to update me? What kind of reminders or support would be most helpful for you?
Does this sound helpful? Click here to download me, and we can start finding that work-life balance today!
Anon. 2018. “Stress: Statistics”. mentalhealth.org. Available at: https://www.mentalhealth.org.uk/explore-mental-health/statistics/stress-statistics [Accessed 10/04/24]
Anon. 2007. “Stress: A major health problem in the U.S., warns APA”. https://www.apa.org. Available at: https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2007/10/stress [Accessed 10/04/24]
Anon (2015). Workplace Burnout Survey. [online] deloitte.com. Available at: https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/pages/about-deloitte/articles/burnout-survey.html [Accessed 4 Oct. 2024].
Anon. 2007. “Stress: A major health problem in the U.S., warns APA”. https://www.apa.org. Available at: https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2007/10/stress [Accessed 10/04/24]
Sjøgaard, G., et al. 2016. “Exercise is more than medicine: The working age population's well-being and productivity”. Journal of sport and health science, 5(2), 159–165. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jshs.2016.04.004 [Accessed 10/04/24]