Achieving a healthy work-life balance sounds too good to be true. Right? Thus, more and more people fail to achieve it, thinking that it’s not possible. However, what if I tell you that it’s easy and anyone can have a perfect balance in work and life by just implementing a few tips in your daily routine? Continue reading to find out.
Balancing work and life to a perfect level is very important to not juggle between the various tasks, errands, and duties, you and I have to tackle every day. This balance helps you stay away from stress and burnout due to overwork, which leads to a successful and peaceful life.
Did you know that about 73% of employees believe that a healthy balance between work and life is more important than high salaries? However, when it comes to achieving it, it gets hard to decide where to start. Sounds familiar? Well, it won’t be after you have gone through and implemented each step of today’s blog post to achieve a healthy work-life balance. With that being said, let me get right into it.
12 Steps to Achieve Healthy Work-Life Balance for Employees
If you can get the perfect work and life balance everyone dreams of, then all the stress and burnout in your life will go away. I am confident in this because I also started getting the desired and expected results and more after I implemented these 12 steps.
So now let me get started on how you can get an equal weight of work and life on the balancing scale. One of the methods is the usage of employee monitoring software. However, I will get to it later.
1. Establish Boundaries
balancing a healthy work-life is not possible without setting any boundaries. For example, working outside your skillset, doing tasks outside office hours, working during time off, and your manager calling you before or after you have clocked in or clocked out. Overall, you need to make all these limits clear with:
- Proper communication
- Learning to say no as the worst that can happen is that you will get discontinued. However, stay positive, there are plenty of work opportunities available these days.
- Read your binding contract with the organization and clearly state what’s off your limits. It’s better to initially set boundaries than regretting later.
Read More: 10 Best HR Software in Canada for 2025
2. Set Priorities
Okay, so let me discuss the work part of your work-life balance guide for a while. So here what I mean is that you should prioritize your tasks. This helps you complete your work on time without unnecessarily speeding up your work pace when the time to clock out is getting near. However, if you don’t have priorities, you will surely make more mistakes even if you don’t want to and then leave work in progress, which reduces your efficiency. Fortunately, there are a few ways to set priorities.
- Do the most complicated tasks first.
- Do the most time-consuming tasks first.
- Use the Eisenhower Matrix, which says:
- Do the urgent and important tasks first.
- Important but not urgent tasks can be done later.
- Urgent but not important tasks need to be delegated.
- Urgent and unimportant tasks get the least priority. You can either do them when wrapping work up or simply ignore them.
One more tip I almost forgot to mention here is to use workflow automation software to automate around 50% of your tasks and save time.
3. Say No
Another problem with most employees is that they say yes to everything. For instance, your manager calls you during your peaceful dinner with your family for some urgent work and If I am correct, you respond with yes, I will do it after having dinner.
To further ruin it for you, all your manager needs to tell you is that, it’s super urgent and you will either start working while eating or leave dinner midway. However, no. it’s not acceptable as you are bringing work home and mixing it with your personal hours, which is not good for your mental health.
So as I mentioned before, to achieve a healthy work-life balance, all you have to say is no, when it’s:
- Not right.
- Outside your skillset
- The work is being given to you outside your office hours
4. Recharge Your Batteries
If you keep working every week without time off or breaks, then what you are doing is the opposite of work-life balance. Trust me on this part, it will affect your mental health so much that you will start behaving like a robot, which is again not an acceptable thing. My motto is that humans should be humans. So unlike all your other basic needs, taking time off and breaks is also mandatory.
So you should include them in your daily routine. It will surely keep your brain and mind at peace, functioning, and rejuvenated. Besides, the fact is that those working professionals like me who often go on tours and trips have calmer minds and a higher focus on work.
5. Hierarchical Task Distribution
Here’s a tip to help your senior-level management and executive employees such as CEOs and CFOs to achieve a healthy work-life balance. Don’t do everything yourself. It’s because if you do, you will only add to your workload and get unnecessary burdens for yourself. The result will be reduced profitability, more stress, and even worse, continual incomplete tasks and losses for your business. Instead what you can do is:
- Delegate tasks to the right people.
- Regularly monitor employees for efficiency and productivity levels.
- Guide your teams and employees with your skillset, expertise, and experience.
6. Fix A Downtime for Yourself
Balancing work and life also involves fixing downtime for yourself. What I mean here is that enough is enough. Nothing should be beyond your health. Here’s what you need to do.
- For days, when you are feeling sick or do not have the 100% will to work, then take a time off.
- If you are never late to work, then you should also clock out on time and not work overtime unnecessarily. In simple words, set your priorities straight. I recommend doing the same for lunch and other breaks.
7. Self-Care Matters
As I mentioned before, living a healthy life is a crucial part of achieving a healthy work-life balance. So self-care should be above everything else. Thus, I have a few tips for the same.
- Eat healthy and maintain a hygienic lifestyle.
- Drink plenty of water.
- Exercise before going to work and after going home. This will make you feel energetic all the time, ensuring that your will to work always remains 100%.
- Yoga, meditation, and pranayama are as mandatory as breathing. It will help you reduce and cope with daily work stress.
Read More: Top 5 Ways to Manage Business Workflow
8. Be Flexible
At times, you have no other choice than to be flexible. For instance, there will be days, when you will have to do overtime due to some urgent work. In such cases, thinking about the incentives will give you much-needed motivation to continue working. Another practical tip here is to set home priorities. That’s how you make work-life balance flexible.
For example, if you know that you are going to reach home late, then you can eliminate some things to do for the day, such as not using social media so that you can have an early dinner and sleep on time. According to my experience and expertise, habit tracker apps can help you a lot with this.
9. Organize Your Day
Here’s a simple fact, you know what you have to do daily like clock in and clock out, and some mundane tasks like file submission. You get the idea. Right? Then, there are some tasks such as urgent meetings, which can come up at any time. So the plan here is to flexibly organize your day and tasks using a scheduling software solution. It’s as simple as that.
10. Adjust
Another step to achieving a healthy work-life balance is to adjust. Adjusting to what? You ask. To uncertainties. For instance, you come to work fully prepared. However, you get a call from home that they just urgently found out about an important marriage in the family, which you must attend. So you will have to take time off on short notice. Two things got adjusted here.
- Your time with family increased.
- The workload also increased for a few of your regular days.
It’s things like these that you must be prepared for.
11. Strengthen Bonds
Another thing I recommend is strengthening your professional relationships to achieve the perfect work and life balance. For instance, if you have a good relationship with your colleagues then you can tell one of them to cover up for you if you have some urgent errand, for let me say, an hour or so. You too can help them out in such cases. Another instance is that you can also help keep each other’s minds calm, reduce stress, and avoid burnout.
12. Tech-Free Days Help
Avoid using technology as much as possible. Especially during time off and breaks. A usual case scenario is that you use more and more social media, which consumes your maximum hours. Then, you blame it all on one day having only 24 hours. However, here, you were responsible for not properly managing your time. So you see how good it will be to live for real and not for reel.
Achieving a Healthy Work-Life Balance with DeskTrack
Make your workday more productive
Time tracking and work management can help you reach your goals
faster.
DeskTrack is a productivity tracking, , project management, and employee monitoring integrated software solution, which works in real-time. Using the tool’s features and functionalities, you can perfect your balance between work and life. How? By evaluating its accurate productivity reports, you will know who is overworking. Plus, by using the hours tracking feature, you will know where most of your work-time is being used the most and prioritize tasks. Similarly, you can also:
- Make schedules within 30 minutes.
- Maintain work and workflow integrity with screenshot monitoring.
- Enhance employee accountability and responsibility by assigning tasks and projects and tracking progress in real-time.
Conclusion
So now you know all about the 12 steps and tips to achieve a healthy work-life balance. As a final word, I can say that a perfect balance between work and life sounds too good to be true. However, achieving this is also essential to maintain a peaceful mind, energy, and will to work without any stress and burnout. However, when it comes to achieving this, people usually fail to identify where to start. So these 12 steps and tips including tech-free days will help them achieve the expected outcome. To aid you in the same, I recommend using DeskTrack, the best all-in-one employee monitoring software.
Q. What is Work-Life Balance?
Ans. In simple words, work-life balance is devoting 100% of the time to work and 100% of the time to personal life without compromising the quality of both. It involves prioritization, adjustment, and balancing out errands and tasks to eliminate stress and burnout.
Q. Why is Balancing Work & Life Important?
Ans. Balancing work and life is essential because:
- It helps you devote equal time to work and life.
- It ensures that you compromise none of these aspects.
- It ensures that there is no stress and burnout.
- It improves your efficiency and productivity.
Q. What are the Signs of Unhealthy Work-Life Balance?
Ans. If you, your manager, or your colleague notice these negative signs, then you need to work on improving your work-life balance.
- Procrastination
- Frequent stress, frustration, and burnout
- Unhealthy physical and mental health
- Too much fatigue
- A dislike towards everyone. Especially those at work.
- Taking more than necessary time off and breaks.
Q. What are Some Examples of Healthy Hobbies to Add to Your Routine?
Ans. According to my expertise and experience, adding these healthy hobbies to your routine will help you improve your work and life balance.
- Yoga, meditation, and pranayama for a healthy mind and body.
- going on tours and trips. This is because you not only explore new places but also because this hobby keeps the mind calm and relaxed.
- Listening to music to rejuvenate the mind.
- Learn a new language as it helps you think out of the box.
- Play board games such as chess. This helps you solve even the most complex work and life problems with ease. Plus, it also helps you make better regret-free decisions in life.
Q. How Can You Set Boundaries Between Work & Personal Life?
Ans. Here are a few tips for setting boundaries between work and personal life for a perfect balance in work and life.
- Proper communication
- Learning to say no as the worst that can happen is that you will get discontinued. However, stay positive, there are plenty of work opportunities available these days.
- Read your binding contract with the organization and clearly state what’s off your limits. It’s better to initially set boundaries than regretting later.
- say no, when it’s not right, outside your skillset, and/or the work is being given to you outside your office hours
