7 Ways to Improve Your Work-Life Balance

Are you juggling between work and personal matters? If yes, it’s the time you should consider a healthy work-life balance. Learn why work-life balance is important and tips to achieve the same. 

“The key is not to prioritise what’s on your schedule, but to schedule your priorities.” Is that all you need to enjoy an effective work-life balance? Of course, not!

But, the art of making a good work-life balance is not rocket science either. You can have it by adopting some essential practices or utilising a tool like TrackoField. Curious to learn? Here is what you must dive into to enjoy a good work-life balance.

What is Work-life Balance?

A healthy work-life balance is not just about starting or completing the work on time. Instead, it’s about prioritising tasks according to their importance, i.e., what is more important, and requires more time, energy, and commitment.

Maintaining a healthy work-life balance plays a crucial role in prioritising self-care for employees as they navigate between professional and personal responsibilities. It is important to achieve an optimal work-life balance for overall well-being.

How do I Know if I Have a Healthy Work-life Balance?

Here are the signs of a healthy work-life balance that will help you recognise if you are on the right path or not.

• Time Management

With picture-perfect plans and goals in front, you manage both your work and personal pursuits like spending time with family or indulging in hobbies. 

• Balanced Social Life

Instead of working conventionally and following the 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. standard, you should adjust your schedule to accommodate your social life. When you are surrounded by like-minded people and expand your social circle, you will feel more relaxed at work.

• Reduced Stress

You implement self-care, spend more time with your loved ones, and prefer flexible work that further leads to reduced stress and boosted endorphins, which enhance sleep and muscle relaxation.

• Clear Boundaries

With specific hours set for work-related tasks and personal activities, you easily draw boundaries between your professional and personal lives. 

Smart Tips to Enhance Your Work-Life Balance

For many, it is a goal to maintain a good work-life balance. However, discovering ways to ensure the same can be challenging. Don’t worry, would have done the job. We have listed down 7 tips through which you begin moving towards a happier and healthier you. 

1. Combine Activities

Exceptional results will be achieved when you combine work with fitness, social, or leisure activities. This will neither impact your activities nor your professional ones. 

For instance, if you feel burnout with back-to-back meetings, try to take them while going out for a walk or traveling to the office. Book a dinner or lunch with your team and family members in your home and talk about things other than work.

2. Enhance Time Management

Whether it be at home or in the office, an effective time management skill will add wonders to your work-life balance. However, don’t forget to consider these essentials while you are on the verge of improving it.

• Try project management software:

TrackoField’s project management software makes it hassle-free in executing and uploading projects on time. Moreover, the software can help you create a digital checklist wherein you can prioritise tasks, edit or self-allocate tasks as per bandwidth, or get a detailed report about tasks vs achievement reports. Thus, the automated system makes task allocation and management seamless for employees.

• Use a daily planner:

What else you need is to use a daily planner to stay organised and lay out your plans in a clear way. This way you will feel less burdened. TrackoField offers daily, weekly, or monthly planners of your tasks, looking at which you can assume the time spent on each task and plan the rest to spend some moments with your loved ones. Even the software provides reminders and alerts to do certain tasks. 

• Give a time limit to each task:

Set yourself a time limit for a single task and then move on to another one. This will help you avoid spending too much time on a single task only.

• Limit distractions:

Block the external distractions or limit them. For instance, if you face trouble with a lot of notifications coming from social media platforms, just block them and concentrate on your work. After work, you can enjoy your time scrolling social media.

3. Take Breaks

Taking a break won’t make you lazy, but it actually boosts your productivity and creativity. However, continuously sitting at a desk for hours can cause eye strain, back pain, and a host of other issues. So, just stretch your leg, drink a glass of water, or walk around to re-energise your mind and body for further tasks. 

4. Ask for Flexibility

Prefer an open conversation with your manager about prioritising a flexible work schedule, timing, and compressed workweek. Because flexibility within the workspace helps in reduced stress and effective balance between professional and personal matters. 

5. Prioritise your Health

Maintaining emotional, mental, and physical health while enjoying the precious moments of life is the core of having a productive day at the workplace. To prioritise a healthy lifestyle, you must consider habits like 

• Movement/exercise
• Daily meditation
• Social connection

6. Emphasise Quality Time

When you have downtime, lead yourself towards a way where you can enjoy quality time for yourself and re-energies your soul. Here are a few ways you can adopt to emphasize quality time. 

• Play your favorite game
• Go on a long drive 
• Listen to your favorite artists
• Dance to the rhythm of enchanting music
• Hit the gym
• Watch movies, dramas, or series

7. Take Vacations

To meet with your other version equipped with renewed energy, focus, and mind, taking vacations can help. A vacation does not always mean an expensive trip, you can enjoy a small staycation at your home and come back with a recharged soul. 

Why is Work-life Balance Important?

According to “the American Institute of Stress,” 80% of workers feel stress in this chaotic corporate world. The reason is poor work-life balance because it not only affects their mental health but also causes severe impacts on the immune system. 

The continuous inability of employees to maintain a balance between work and life responsibilities is increasing. Here are numbers and figures that tell you about the same. 

• 25% of workers consider their jobs as the number one stressor. 
• 42% of employees in America say their coworkers need help in managing stress.
• Some 57% of Canadian and American workers feel stress daily.
• Poor work-life balance makes employees extend more working hours while being less productive.
• Overworking leads to stress, burnout, fatigue, and other health-related issues among employees. 
• The risk of stroke is higher in employees who work more than 55 hours a week. 

All these are relevant enough to bring your focus on the importance of work-life balance.

Signs of an Unhealthy Work-life Balance

You may be wondering whether you are struggling with an unhealthy work-life balance or not. Well, it’s time to clear the air! Here are six characteristics of a poor work-life balance. 

1. You feel spaced out at places beyond work and start thinking about your tasks. 
2. Lower energy or unexplained aches and pains at work.
3. Not only you feel irritated with your co-workers but also distant from your loved ones.
4. Even when you are sick, mentally strained, or have personal things to do, it feels like a struggle to take time off. 
5. It’s always the same tiring and exhausting feeling while focussing on tasks.
6. No specific boundaries between your professional and personal responsibilities because your work spills into your personal life and you don’t get relevant time to engage in life matters.

What Leads to Poor Work-Life Balance?

When the boundaries between your work and life begin to blur, there you get an imbalance between your work and personal priorities. Here are all the possible reasons that lead to poor work-life balance:

• Poor Company culture

A company culture that brings implicit pressure on employees to stay even when it’s not needed can cause poor work-life balance. Moreover, most companies expect their employees to continue to work when they are not feeling well, and all these lead to workforce inefficiency.

• Lack of flexibility

What else supports poor work-life balance is a lack of flexibility. For instance, if you cannot work remotely or cannot leave the office early for a family matter, then again poor work-life balance takes its form.

• Longer working hours

Giving more time to work, rather than spending it with your loved ones, can also create building blocks of stress and you may not feel content while playing your job role. 

• Bad time management

Not being able to balance priorities and time for work and family also represents a poor work culture because of the exceeding hours you have to provide to the office blindly.  

• Increased responsibility at work

With a long to-do list, employees feel overwhelmed and burned out at work. Instead, it affects the quality of work when they have too much on their plates. If a company increases an employee’s responsibility then it also provides them with flexible timing so their priorities won’t get affected. 

How TrackoField Helps in Achieveing a Healthy Work-Life Balance?

TrackoField is an employee monitoring software favorable to employees and organisations. It automates task allocation, helps in workflow management, and improves work-life balance with loads of features. Some of them are: 

• Geo-coded Attendance

Instead of spending time visiting the office regularly to mark themselves as logged in, employees can use the geo-coded Attendance feature and check in after reaching the client’s site. This saves the employees’ time to travel to the office which they can use further for personal matters.

• Attendance Override

TrackoField’s attendance override tool makes it seamless for employees to get their attendance or perks after completing the tasks during holidays or day-offs. Usually, employees hold grudges when not getting the perks for the work they have done on holidays and this affects their mental health. Fortunately, the software helps in dealing with this and thus ensures a healthy work-life balance. 

• Task Attendance Linking

As tasks are linked with attendance, employees don’t have to rely on multiple platforms to submit their projects, assignments, or tasks. TrackoField’s task attendance linking saves them from head-scratching into papers and other tools. 

• Reimbursement Expense Notification

When employees burn their pockets for organisational activities, they wait for several days to get the reimbursed amount as managers have to dive deep into invoices, bills, and papers. Not getting the amount on time can disturb employees financially. Fortunately, TrackoField’s reimbursement expense automates the entire procedure and makes reimbursement some taps away procedure. 

• Automatic Travel Expense Calculation

TrackoField also consists of an automated travel expense calculator that calculates the expenses incurred by employees while traveling from one client’s site to another. Instead of spending time manually reporting or processing travel expense reimbursements, employees can save time for other human-centric tasks and personal matters and thus maintain a good work-life balance. 

• Leave Management System

The robust leave management system of TrackoField allows employees to raise requests and admins to respond in real-time. This again saves the time of employees and helps them check the leave balance, applied leaves, leave history, and other types of leaves using their fingertips only. 

Final Takeaway!

A poor work-life balance not only impacts employees’ health and well-being but also slows down the overall organisation’s productivity. Fortunately, with the right software and a change-leading mindset, any company can simplify their employees’ tasks and help them maintain a balance between work and life. 

TrackoField is one such software that automates the entire procedure with features like bulk task allocation, expense reimbursement, and leave management, and facilitates an effective work-life balance for employees. 

Want to learn more about TrackoField’s features?

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FAQs on Work-Life Balance

• What is work-life balance?

  Work-life balance is a philosophical concept that defines how we will manage our work schedule without sacrificing or comprising our personal life (beyond work).

• Why is work-life balance important?

  Work-life balance is important to eliminate unnecessary stress levels and maintain our physical health simultaneously. Having a poor work-life balance can lead to overworking and neglecting personal well-being and responsibilities – which can further add to employee burnout.