How to balance work and life: the ultimate guide
In this article, you will discover 5 tips on how to balance work and life.
If your professional life interferes negatively with your personal life or vice versa, you experience excessive stress which is likely to have a negative impact on your health.
If you want to take control of your life, I suggest you discover without further delay my 5 tips on how to find a greater balance between personal and professional life.
Here are briefly my 5 tips that will help you answer the question you’ve been asking yourself for some time, namely:
How to manage your private and professional life?
1 – Protect your health to overcome the imbalance between private and professional life
2 – Define the ideal result to better reconcile private and professional life
3 – Act within your sphere of influence to optimize your impact
4 – Define a clear border between private and professional life
5 – Become more productive
Here is my first advice on your health right away because without good health you will not be able to fully enjoy your life.
1 – Protect your health to overcome the imbalance between private and professional life
The starting point for your action plan is to first protect your mental and physical health.
Without good health, you will not be able to find a good balance in your private and professional life.
Take the time to assess the real consequences of this imbalance on your overall health.
What is your energy level when you get out of bed in the morning?
What about your quality of sleep?
Do you take the time to eat a balanced diet?
Do you get sick more often than usual?
Answering these questions is important to become aware of your current health condition so that you can understand what you can do to improve it.
In case of specific needs, you may need to meet with a health professional, a psychologist, or even a therapist.
But in most cases, you can regain control of your existence by improving your lifestyle. This becomes possible by improving the quality of your current lifestyle.
Here are some quick tips for taking action.
Operational tip: assess your current lifestyle and take action!
Take time to fully assess your current lifestyle.
Take a sheet and a pen and answer the following questions:
What score between 1 and 10 would I give to my current level of health?
What bad habits do I need to eliminate from my life?
What more productive habits can I implement to improve my health?
Which people should I keep away from in order to protect my health?
What other people should I meet more often because they are good for my health?
What changes should I make to my professional choices to protect my health?
What should I change in my family life to strengthen my health?
After answering these questions, write down a list of the actions you need to take to improve your current state of health in order to quickly and efficiently make some progress.
If, for example, you feel that your health level is equal to 5 out of 10, write down all the actions allowing you to quickly go to at least 6 out of 10.
Then, once this list has been completed, establish an order of priority and program the first action that you will take in the next 24 hours in your agenda or to-do list.
Finally, take this action, congratulate yourself, evaluate the effectiveness of this action and program the other actions daily in your to-do list.
By proceeding in this way, you will have started a virtuous cycle which is highly beneficial for improving your overall health.
Now, you’re ready to move on to the second tip in this article on how to find a better work-life balance, which is by defining exactly what you want to achieve.
2 – Define the ideal result to better manage your private and professional life
You cannot achieve a result if you do not have a clear vision of what you want.
Even with a clear vision of what you want to experience in your life, you will not take action if you do not know what motivates you to pursue this goal.
I, therefore, suggest that you start from your current situation by being honest with yourself in order to understand what you are experiencing at the moment.
What emotions do you experience every day?
Are they rather pleasant or unpleasant?
What emotions are you denying?
What emotions could you use to your advantage?
Answering these questions is one of the ways you can:
- build on your current motivations
- identify stronger motivations
- take action faster to make a better life
Use the emotions that bother you the most, use the potential or real pain you feel to take new actions.
Here are some tips for taking action.
Operational tip: make your future more real
It is one thing to imagine your future but it is another thing to live it as if it were real.
Don’t settle for your current motivations because they have so far proven to be too weak to change your life.
Connect to your future, experience emotions, both negative and positive.
Use them all!
What are you no longer ready to accept in your work or in your private life?
On the contrary, what is likely to make you happy?
Close your eyes and feel these emotions without filter and without exaggeration.
What are you ready to do now to eliminate this pain from your life?
What price do you have to pay to create the life you dream of so much?
Use pain and pleasure to your advantage instead of being the guinea pig!
Now re-open your eyes and write precisely what is no longer acceptable in your life and what you want to experience to be happier.
Then, as before, write, plan and execute the actions that will help you create the life you deserve.
Take action quickly and keep up the pace to get closer to your new life on a regular basis.
Now you’re ready to move on to the third piece of advice in this article on how to balance work and personal life, namely focusing on what depends on you.
3 – Act within your sphere of influence to optimize your impact
To recreate a greater balance between your professional and personal life requires regaining control of what you are responsible for, namely what you can control completely.
Identifying and acting first within your direct sphere of influence is not only the best way to get the results you expect but also an extremely effective way to improve self-confidence.
By focusing your energies and your capacities on the actions for which you are completely responsible, you will find a better quality of life more quickly while strengthening your habit of acting, day after day, to put your well-being at the heart of your life.
Here are some quick tips for taking action.
Operational tip: tell the difference between your sphere of influence and the rest
Instead of wasting your time and energy on actions with low potential, take the time to objectively assess what is entirely up to you.
Then do the same for what you can partially influence.
Finally, realize what is not up to you.
Take a sheet and a pen and make a list of what is up to you and what you can do to transform your life the way you want.
Follow the same process for events that you can influence.
Prioritize these actions then program them in your to-do list and quickly take action.
The faster the better. Do not procrastinate, do not wait for the ideal moment, act, and then assess the progress of your actions.
You will always have time to reorganize your actions according to the situation and the results obtained.
Doing so will allow you to start regaining control of your life and no longer fall into excuses for not acting immediately.
Now you’re ready to move on to the fourth tip in this article on how to recreate a better work-life balance, that is, defining the boundaries between your private and professional life.
4 – Define a clear border between your private and professional life
Setting clear boundaries between personal and professional life is essential to ensure that current problems do not arise again in your life.
In a previous article on telework, I highlighted the results of some studies showing the importance of the separation between professional and personal life.
More specifically, the ability to disconnect from work once at home and to define professional and personal life is essential for everyone’s physical and mental health.
You are responsible for ensuring that these limits are redefined in order to avoid one area of life overflowing into the other by negatively affecting the overall quality of your life.
Whether it’s setting a framework with your employer or talking openly about it with your family, it’s “the time” for change. If you do not communicate your needs and allow others to do whatever they want, you will pay a high price for your health.
Ma & Yin (2012) show that the establishment of this border is not the same for everyone and that everything depends on the more or less important value that each person places on work and his private life.
Here are some quick tips for taking action.
Operational tip: delimit your territory
It’s time to stop being too kind in order to rebalance an unsustainable situation.
Identify the culprits, that is, those responsible for this situation.
Who are they?
Draw a table of four columns, then note in the:
- first, the first name of the person in question
- second, which prevented you from speaking openly with her
- third, the current and future consequences if you do not take action
- fourth, the benefits to you if you take action quickly
Organize your actions in order of importance, plan them in your to-do list, then in your calendar, take action, congratulate yourself, evaluate the impact of your actions and continue to improve.
In this way, you will take one more step towards your freedom while becoming more assertive.
Now you’re ready to move on to the fifth tip in this article on how to rebuild a better work-life balance, namely by becoming more productive in your work as well as in your private life.
5 – Become more productive
If you follow the 4 tips previously exposed, you will be able to find and keep a better balance between your private life and your professional life.
But to have one more advantage, you can learn to become more productive at work but also in your private life.
It is not about working more but doing your work using more effective strategies.
In previous articles, I also talked about how to get more organized at work and how to write a to-do list to plan your tasks effectively.
As you know, the number one enemy of productivity is procrastination. I had covered this in-depth in two articles, 10 tips for stopping procrastination and 11 tips for fighting procrastination at work and at home.
But if I were to give one piece of advice to become more productive, I would tell you to develop new, more productive habits.
This is because contrary to what you might think, relying exclusively on your effort and motivation is not the most effective strategy for modifying unwanted behavior.
This factor is important at the beginning but it is less important for creating lasting change.
The most effective way to create and achieve lasting change is to build on new, more productive habits.
It is by repeating these new behaviors that you will become more productive.
Another way to become more productive is to use productivity strategies that have already shown their effectiveness in the field and in the context of scientific research.
For example, a very effective productivity strategy is to identify your chronotype, which is the time of day in which you operate optimally, and then schedule your most important tasks during that time of the day. I discuss this topic more fully and more in my 14 tips for becoming more productive.
Here are some quick tips for taking action.
Operational tip: develop better habits
Before you can develop new habits, you need to be aware of the ones you already have that are not very productive, if at all.
Take a sheet and a pen and draw a table of 5 columns, in the:
- first, write down the habit you would like to eliminate
- second, the past and present consequences of this habit
- third, the future consequences of this habit if you don’t act
- fourth, the benefits if you act immediately
- fifth, the first action you take to start developing a new, more productive habit
Then plan these actions in your to-do list and then in your calendar and quickly take action.
Conclusion on how to find a balance between your private and professional life
In this article on how to balance your personal and professional life, I have presented operational advice to regain control of your life and regain greater well-being.
Your health, a clear vision of what you want, a focus on what is under your control, greater assertiveness, and better productivity, will allow you to find the balance you are looking for.
If you are interested in the topic of productivity, I invite you to discover all my articles on productivity.
If you are looking for tools to improve your time management skills, I recommend you read my article on the best time management apps.
If you want to learn how to manage your time, I invite you to find out more about our online time management course.
If you appreciated the advice presented in this article, I invite you to share it with your contacts by email and on social networks. If you would like to benefit from the expertise of a time management coach, write to us now using our contact form.
If you are ready to take action, check out our life coaching packages:
- one month life coaching package
- 3-month life coaching package
- 6-month life coaching package
- 1-year life coaching package
Read this article in other languages
Français : Équilibre entre vie privée et professionnelle : 5 astuces pour le retrouver
Italiano: Equilibrio tra vita privata e lavoro: 5 consigli per ritrovarlo