The honest truth about work-life balance is that the perfect work-life balance strategy simply doesn’t exist. Odd opener for a balanced lifestyle blog isn’t it?

Let me tell you why I feel this way. The perfect work-life balance strategy would allow us to pursue all of our interests and fully develop the different domains of living we felt were important. However, I think that no matter how hard we try we will inevitably end up sacrificing some of these areas which are important to us as we pursue others.

As a result, the perfect work-life balance strategy simply doesn’t exist. Chasing after that type of perfection will only bring us dissatisfaction and unhappiness. By far the better option is to make small conscious choices every single day which lead to us being less stressed and more successful.

There are many TED Talks on the topic of work-life balance. I feel that Nigel Marsh hits on some of the main topics that we’re going to be talking about today. He discusses how we can make work-life balance work for us!

The term work-life balance is everywhere nowadays. From busy CEOs and companies to life coaches. It’s definitely a hot topic as our personal and professional lives compete for our attention.

Despite the perfect balance being non-existent, we should still strive for a good work-life balance strategy. A positive work-life balance strategy can improve our morale, motivation, and our general life satisfaction. This often translates to increased productivity and a happier and more successful lifestyle.

Establishing a work-life balance strategy is difficult, especially as technology has enabled us to take our work with us wherever we go. It’s becoming harder and harder to separate work from the rest of our lives. Work-life balance isn’t the issue anymore, it’s how can we manage work-life integration. This adds perspective to the Dolly Parton quote, “don’t get so busy making a living that you forget to make a life.”

It seems as though establishing boundaries and an effective work-life balance strategy is more important than ever. This is highlighted by the fact that many studies have shown that well-rounded individuals tend to be the happiest and most productive!

How I Teach Work-Life Balance

To me, work-life balance is not simply incorporating equal amounts of every domain of living into your life. It’s also not about determining how many hours you dedicate to your work and life pursuits.

For me, work-life balance is a process of establishing self-awareness. It’s about prioritizing and balancing the aspects of life that you deem to be important. It’s about finding a balance personalized to your lifestyle, value, and goals. This should keep our minds and bodies happy, healthy, motivated, and energized!

From that point of view, life balance isn’t about balance at all. It’s about harmony. Establishing a lifestyle where the different domains of living function in harmony to facilitate your success and happiness is the true goal. Or at least it’s what I like to teach as being the true goal of work-life balance.

However, when you allow these different areas of your life to fall out of harmony, negative consequences can arise. That’s why it’s so important to figure out what this type of life harmony means to you. It will help you to create your work-life balance strategy. Once you’ve done that you can begin establishing a balanced lifestyle that suits your unique needs and desires.

Steps to Define Your Work-Life Balance

I’ve actually already covered this topic in great depth in my article, “Your Balanced Lifestyle Definition.” I highly recommend you at least glance over that article before proceeding, but I’ll summarize the main steps here very briefly.

• Define Your Life Goals and Values
  

  Once you have an understanding of your goals and values you will be better able to organize your life balance around them. Now only will this help you establish a work-life balance that encourages your success, but it should facilitate your happiness as well!

• Ask Yourself if Your Current Life is Aligned with Your Goals and Values
  

  Now that you’ve taken the time to reflect and become self-aware, you can ask this critical question. Is your current lifestyle aligned with your goals and values? You should take some time to think about this as well. Are your actions taking you where you want to go in life, or are they taking you down a separate path? An honest answer to this question can be the make-or-break turning point on your journey to establishing a balanced living strategy.

• If Your Lifestyle and Goals Are Misaligned, Do Something About It
  

  This step is for those who identify their lifestyles as being out of alignment with their goals and values. If your actions are currently taking you down a path you deem to be the incorrect one, figure out how to get on the right path. This isn’t always easy, but I promise you that it’s worth it. Start with small steps in the right direction and then build towards the lifestyle you desire and goals you wish to achieve.

Strategies to Achieve Your Work-Life Balance Strategy

• Become Aware and Break the Cycle
  

  This is a challenge I find common to most people. I even fall into it myself from time to time. When we get into a routine, sometimes we fail to realize how poor we’ve allowed our work-life balance to become. It takes a significant amount of self-awareness to identify these moments, and even more to identify how to fix the problem. However, this is the first step.

  Ask yourself, how is your work-life balance? Are you happy? Are you being rewarded? If not, you may need to rethink your work-balance life balance strategy. Maybe you could take that extra effort you’re pouring into your work and reinvest it into other areas of your life that would bring you more happiness and fulfillment!

• Keep Track of Yourself
  

  I often hear from people that they don’t feel that they have time for their true priorities. Let me tell you something, it’s not a matter of time, very rarely is this the case. It’s much more commonly a matter of poor self-management and prioritization or lack of motivation.

  So keep track of how you spend ALL of your time for a week. Ask yourself, are you really jam-packed? Or could you give up an hour of social media, or skip that re-run of The Big Bang Theory. I promise if you do this exercise, you’ll find the time you’re looking for. The main goal here is to hold yourself accountable as your work to develop your work-life balance strategy.

• Plan Properly

  Once you’ve found time for your priorities, plan exactly when you’ll make time for them. It doesn’t matter if it’s a social night with friends, a few hours at the gym, or an evening to read. What’s important is that you plan exactly when you’re going to dedicate time to your priorities and goals.

  Additionally, after you’ve set a plan you’ll find that you become a much more efficient time-manager. You are now beginning to create a life that revolves around the things you enjoy. Welcome to my version of balanced living!

• Create Separate Spaces

  This is an incredibly useful strategy that I’ve just recently begun using. Creating separate spaces and establishing boundaries helps me to separate work from the rest of my life. What I mean by this is that I do my best to leave my work at work. I don’t want to bring it into other areas of my life unless there is an immediate need or emergency that must be addressed.

  These spaces could be separated physically or temporally. Physical separation is probably the more traditional thought of leaving work at work. Temporal separation could mean that you are doing work at home but only within certain timeframes. This definition is very useful for people who commonly work off-site.

  A strategy that I’ve personally found quite useful is turning off my devices in the evening. Or at the very least, avoid them as much as possible. This helps me to relax at the end of the day and enjoy some quality time. It also usually leads to a more restful night which then provides me extra energy to be more productive the next day!

• Reduce Distractions During Work

  This builds on the last strategy. When you’re trying to accomplish something, remove distractions so that you can truly focus on the task at hand. It’s crazy how often we’re distracted. Some studies have indicated that the number is as high as every few minutes. Those distractions can be HUGE time wasters and take away from our life balance because it increases how long it takes us to get things done.

  So put your phone in the other room, lock your social media accounts, log out of your email, etc. Reducing as many distractions as possible will help you to be more productive. That will, in turn, give you more opportunities to establish and implement your personalized work-life balance strategy!

• Remove Sources of Unhappiness and Cultivate Positivity

  This can be tricky, especially if your work is the source of your unhappiness. But do your best to find work that you enjoy. Then find ways to eliminate other activities from your life that you don’t enjoy. If an activity makes you unhappy, don’t dedicate a significant amount of time to it unless you absolutely have to.
  

  After you’ve removed the negativity from your life begin incorporating more positivity! Evaluate the different areas of your life and the relationships you have that bring you enjoyment. Investing in these already existing aspects of your life can really tip your daily scale toward a more positive experience.

  Now be careful. Don’t invest so much in pre-existing relationships and activities that you cut yourself off from new experiences. Sometimes putting yourself out there and trying new things can be a source of positivity in and of itself.

  The moral of the story is to be brave enough to try new things but also be aware enough to know what makes you happy. Find a way to balance the two types of experiences into your work-life balance strategy.

• Maintain a Healthy Lifestyle

  We have all be bombarded with health information in the past years. From eating healthy to exercising every day, the world is now filled with accessible information. So take advantage of it!

  If you learn how to live a healthy life you will have more energy. That’s energy you can use to get more done in a day and pursue different areas of your life. Additionally, you’ll experience improved mood and if you’re lucky, you’ll lower your risk for many diseases and illnesses in the process!

  Overall, healthy lifestyles can help you to develop good habits and prevent you from slipping back into bad ones. So whether you’re getting to the gym for the recommended daily dose of physical activity or just getting outside for a brisk stroll, the impacts of living a healthy lifestyle are HUGE! So be sure to incorporate this in some way into your work-life balance strategy.

• Create Your 3 Daily Priorities List

  If you’re one of the OGs who has been following my @excellence.addiction Instagram page for a while then you’ve definitely heard this message before.

  I believe that if we set three main realistic priorities to get done every day, our productivity skyrockets. That’s not to say you can’t go and do more once you finish that daily list. But what it does is reduces distractions created by competing tasks because you know what your main priorities are for the day. Additionally, when our brains multitask they tend to make more mistakes which can result in a significant amount of wasted time.

• Align Your Life Balance with Your Life Purpose

  Ask yourself, what reason were you put on this planet for? What goals do you want to accomplish? Reflect on those questions for a while. Once you have some answers, ask yourself if your current lifestyle is facilitating or hindering your progress towards those goals.

  If your lifestyle is holding you back, I’m willing to bet it’s a source of unhappiness. Try to find ways to align your work-life balance strategy with your actions and life purpose.

• Set Aside Some You Time

  This can mean almost anything really, so I feel that a few examples might help get the point across. Whether its 10-minutes of meditation, a relaxing walk, or a week vacation, take time for you.

  Take time to reflect on your day, what went well, and what could have gone better. Take time to shut off the hustle of your mind and let it be at ease for a while. Allow yourself the opportunity to recharge. (For those of you into meditation, I highly recommend checking out the headspace app!)

• Check if Your Employers Offer Any Work-Life Balance Aids

  This isn’t provided by all employers, but many are trending in this direction. Many are doing away with the regular 9-5 schedules and providing more flexible schedules or work from home options. This includes many notable and highly innovative companies such as Facebook and Google.

  Employers are looking to provide services that help their employees manage their work-life balance because they are beginning to realize the benefits. An employee with a positive work-life balance strategy in place tends to be happier, more fulfilled, and more productive. So check in with your employer and see if they provide any of these types of aids that can help you establish a more positive work-life balance.

  Some examples could include flex hours, health and wellness incentive programs, telecommuting options, employee enrichment activities, etc. I guarantee that most organizations are looking to help you achieve your balanced living goals so don’t be afraid to ask. Most employers are open to feedback and are looking to improve the experience of their employees.

  If, however, your employer has no such options, I think the best strategy is to focus on other areas of your life outside of work. Find ways to gain control beyond your 9-5. That should help you to reduce your stress and establish a better work-life balance strategy.

• Be Brave Enough to Ask For Help

  This can be a tough task for us sometimes, to ask others for help. There is no shame in admitting that you’re feeling overwhelmed or stressed out. It’s 2018, with our new focus and understanding of mental health issues there is no need for you to silently suffer. Ask others for help as you try to establish a better work-life balance strategy. You will not regret it.

Conclusion

The reason I provided you with so many different strategies was not to overwhelm you or flaunt my knowledge. The purpose was to provide you with a variety of different strategies because you are different from everyone else. The strategies that work for you might not work for someone else, and vice versa. So, begin with the strategies that resonated with you and then continue adding other ones.

No matter how hard we try, work-life balance will never be a one-size-fits-all solution. Though there are some general steps we can all take to help us achieve it, the exact balance will always differ. Furthermore, the balance will likely be constantly changing as our lifestyles, goals, and values change.

So don’t feel as though you need to remodel your life all at once and make drastic changes. You’ll constantly be tweaking your work-life balance strategy, so small sequential steps are perfect.

I hope that this article has encouraged you to take action in your life. I can provide you with all the knowledge you could ever need on the topic of balanced living. However, if you don’t put that knowledge into action then you’ll never benefit from it. So get out there and take action, I don’t care how small the steps you take may be.

Creating a personalized work-life balance strategy definitely takes determination, persistence, and patience. It’s definitely worth it though. Those of us who take the time to self-assess ourselves and establish a balanced lifestyle certainly reap the rewards of a happy and healthy life!

Final Question

So what did you think of these strategies? Were they any good? Do you have any other tips you’d like to leave for people looking to create their work-life balance strategy? Please leave a comment with your thoughts! It helps me to better serve you!

Until next time everyone, stay excellent!

Mark