I love (and need!) this article from Remote Worker; which shares 12 ways to improve your remote work-life balance. They also took part in a live chat last week which is well worth a watch.
Today’s remote work culture comes with many benefits. You save time commuting to the office and spend those hours with the family. You can create a flexible work schedule to manage work and personal responsibilities.
The State of Remote Work Report 2020 finds that about 98% of people want to work remotely. During and after the pandemic, many employees have started working from remote locations, temporarily or permanently. While this new norm sounds exciting and convenient, it poses a challenge for maintaining a healthy work-life balance.
Your mind feels pressure from getting in Zoom video meets every day and spending more time online. Without coworkers around you to lighten your mood and remind you to take breaks, you might find yourself working additional hours. Countless studies have shown that regular after-hours work can lead to job burnout and reduced productivity.
Importance of Healthy Work-Life Balance
Today’s remote work culture comes with many benefits. You save time commuting to the office and spend those hours with the family. You can create a flexible work schedule to manage work and personal responsibilities.
Here’s why work-life balance is important for both employers and employee:
- More Engagement
A perfect balance between work and home increases the engagement levels of workers. Employees like employers enabling this balance, and they become loyal advocates for the brand. So, whether working in a physical office space or a remote location, work-life balance is critical.
- Less Job Burnout
Stress is inevitable – we all become stressed from time to time. Fortunately, workplace burnouts are avoidable by making concentrated efforts to avoid overworking. Job burnout happens when we become overwhelmed and can’t meet the constant demand.
As a result, it affects almost all aspects of our lives. So, employers should encourage workers to take a break and leave work where it belongs, at work.
- Consistent Mindfulness
Being able to sustain a healthy work-life balance results in a greater ability to concentrate on what’s happening in the present. This is referred to as mindfulness.
When you can maintain a good work-life balance, you can focus more on the tasks at hand. This results in increased retention and increased productivity.
- Fewer Health Problems
Overworked and stressed people eventually develop health problems, especially mental illnesses and physical or neurological issues. When you work remotely, you have the additional stress of fulfilling many personal obligations as well. All of this can lead to conditions like strokes, obesity, and respiratory problems.
It’s clear why a good work-life balance is critical to everyone, including employers, employees, and everyone in between.
Fortunately, there’re proven strategies to deal with remote work burnout and maintain a healthy work-life balance. We’ll list those below.
So, how do you ensure a good work-life balance while working remotely? How do you ensure that all your employees are working as productively as they would from the office? How do you ensure proper energy and time allocation between professional and personal responsibilities?
Here are a few ways to work on improving your work-life balance:
Develop a Morning Ritual Centered Around Wellbeing
Now that you work remotely and save hours on travelling to the office, you can utilize that time for good. You can do some workout, meditate, or engage in some energizing fun activities. Put simply, schedule these saved hours as non-negotiable ‘me’ time.
Creating a perfect morning ritual helps make the most out of your day. It results in increased productivity and better mental and physical wellbeing.
Here are five things you can do during the first hour of your day to stay healthy, happy, and productive:
- Get Up Early: Studies say that those who wake up early are more likely to have a successful career. It makes you more positive and improves your overall well-being relative to younger adults.
- Gratitude: Wake up with gratitude towards good things in life. Study shows that practising gratitude improves your resilience and reduces stress. Also, you’ll stop complaining and start noticing more opportunities to be grateful.
- Workout and Meditation: Incorporating physical exercise and meditation in your morning routine is good for your mind and body.
- Eat Proper Nutrition-Rich Breakfast: Working on an empty stomach can hurt your ability to concentrate due to low energy levels. Eat something filling and healthy balanced meal instead of grabbing a breakfast bar.
Schedule Your Day/Week & Breaks
Flexibility is one of the biggest benefits of working from home because you can choose your convenient work schedule. But, this freedom may sometimes result in a poor schedule. It further jeopardized the quality of your work and lifestyle.
So, instead of working aimlessly throughout the day, it’s helpful to schedule a work-from-home workday.
Schedule all your activities and errands throughout the day. You may feel isolated, stressed, and bored while working remotely. To overcome this, schedule some productive breaks throughout working hours. Taking breaks lowers stress levels and improves productivity.
A relaxing and fun end-of-day ritual helps separate your personal and professional life. Turn off your laptop at the scheduled time and celebrate all you’ve achieved throughout the day. Have evening snacks with your family, indulge in outdoor activities, and watch TV for a few minutes.
Practice Time Blocking
Do you often struggle with time management? Time blocking could be the answer to your productivity and time management problems.
Time blocking or timeboxing is a time management method to schedule your day into controlled units. With this approach, you allot a particular time period to specific tasks and stick to that. The time blocking theory says that the stricter we’re with the time allotted to each task, the more focused and result-driven our output becomes.
With proper time boxing, you can manage your efforts effectively while minimizing disruptive context switching. You become extremely protective with time distribution by prioritizing important complex tasks over low-value daily tasks.
Done well, time blocking also helps you be on the right track. You know that if you delve into Instagram scrolling, you may fall behind the schedule.
To make time blocking work for you:
- Identify your priorities
- Figure out how long each task should take
- Factor in your productive habits
Use Productivity Tools
Productivity is one common challenge for remote workers.
Fortunately, several good productivity tools help automate your daily tasks. These tools allow for effective collaboration that further leads to improved productivity.
Some of the best productivity tools you can use are:
- Asana: Project and task management
- Slack: For effective communication
- Trello: Collaborative team and task management
- Zoom: Remote video communication platform
- Monday: All-in-one project management and workflow platform
Some other recommended tools are Evernote, Microsoft 365, Join.Me, LastPass, and Buffer, to name a few. Many times, one tool may not suffice. So, you can use multiple tools to address different aspects of project, team, and time management. Most of these tools come with an intuitive and user-friendly interface. You can start using them easily with little to no training.
The first benefit of using productivity tools is a remarkable improvement in the quality of work. In addition, these tools enable better team collaboration and reduce tedious paperwork.
Communicate Effectively
Effective work communication has become even more important than ever before. Though it’s a little challenging, making conscious efforts can help establish successful communication.
Before we discuss the solution, let’s understand the challenges of maintaining effective remote communication.
- The lack of visibility: Who’s available, how to be sure if they’re available, how is working on what?
- Lack of context: You can’t see the body language and can’t understand coworkers’ or employees’ moods and emotions.
- Fewer 1:1 meetings: You can conduct 1:1 meetings on an employee-to-employee basis using tools like Slack and Zoom. But, manager-direct report 1:1s may be forgotten when you can’t see the team on a daily basis.
Fortunately, there are many tools to address all these challenges. You can use online chat tools, video conferencing software, project collaboration apps, and even a digital workspace.
If you are a boss, manager, or team leader, play your role by opening communication and feedback lines.
Cook Yourself Instead of Ordering
When working remotely, you may feel tempted to order food or grab food bars. But did you know this jeopardizes your creativity and makes you lazy? On top of that, this makes you unhealthy. So, cook your own snacks and food during scheduled breaks.
Unhealthy eating habits have become a concern among many remote workers. Eating desserts for breakfast, snacking frequently, and scoffing leftovers randomly throughout the day! These are quite common scenes.
Rather you should consider this as a great opportunity to feed your body healthily. You have time and tools to prepare nutritional meals instead of picking processed or readymade foods.
You’ll find countless recipes for healthy snacking and meals on the internet. Look for something simple and easy, and cook yourself with the goodness of nutrition.
Design an Ideal Workspace that Keeps Work and Life Separate
Avoid wandering aimlessly from room to room with your laptop and stationery. Lack of physical boundaries between your workspace and home can disrupt the work-life balance. Get a dedicated workspace where you can focus solely on your job.
Your home office can be a separate room or a quiet corner in the bedroom. Regardless of the shape and size, find a place that supports your daily workflow and avoids distractions of your household.
Allow enough space so that you can move easily from side to side comfortably. Choose an office desk and chair that supports an ideal body posture. The desk’s height should not be too high; the ideal range of 28”-30” (70-75cm).
It’s easy to overlook storage and shelving when designing a home office. Make sure you have enough shelving, filing cabinets, or cupboards to store your stationery and other essential items.
Do clients, customers, or colleagues visit you regularly? Get a small meeting area that can be as simple as a couch and coffee table.
Refrain from Multitasking
When working from home, home chores and other stuff may easily distract you. You might try to cover more tasks in a very short time by multitasking.
But, did you know multitasking often jeopardizes your productivity and can be damaging your brain? Yes, you read that right!
Many people think that multitasking or switching from one task to another makes you good. But, in reality, the ability to lose your focus is not appreciable. Studies show that multitasking reduces your productivity level by 40 per cent.
That sounds pretty harsh, but repeated exposure to multitasking hurts your ability to continue learning and can even cause you to lose ground. Frequent multitasking hurts your cognitive ability and lowers your IQ level. You may lose your ability to distinguish between essential and non-essential tasks. Multitasking also reduces your performance, makes projects last longer, and results in stress-inducing backlogs.
So, don’t let distractions bleed into your project time. You may address these chores during your break.
Socialize While Working Remotely
The workplace plays an important role in social lives. Meaningful workplace relationships make you happier, more engaged, and productive.
In light of this fact, it’s easy to feel isolated when working remotely. Without over-the-coffee chats, team lunches, and daily meets, the feeling of loneliness is common. So, don’t miss any opportunity to socialize and develop your relationships.
Stay connected to friends on social media platforms. Use these platforms to grow your personal and professional connections. If possible, use coworking spaces to meet peers to get a dose of social interaction.
When making video calls, turn your camera on. When you could see people’s faces, it helps connect on a stronger and deeper level. You can also hold virtual coffee breaks, lunches, cultural festivals, and movie nights.
Connect to people in person when you visit nearby parks, malls, or other facilities around you. Most importantly, don’t lock yourself in the room and stay connected with your family members.
Learn to Say No
Many people struggle to say no, fearing anger, rejection, or disappointments. Being raised to be a good person, we get used to saying yes, and this easily makes us stressed. This eventually risks your mental health, especially when you’re very busy.
What’s the solution? Learn to say NO!
When you are overstretched, saying no shows your professionalism and reinforces the value of your time. Be kind, clear, and respectful while delivering your no.
The words you use with your ‘no’ make a huge difference. Pepper your response with terms like support, responsibility, prioritize, and commitment. Avoid negative words or phrases altogether. You can also accompany your response with a short and concise reason so that people can understand the rationale.
Use a win-win tactic by referring someone else with the same or more applicable expertise and bandwidth. Finally, don’t forget to show gratitude to be asked for something important. Say something like, “I appreciate that you considered me.”
Be Kind to Yourself
When you are at home full time, you have to take care of both personal and professional responsibilities. This may jeopardize your productivity and pressure you. So, practice being kind to yourself.
Self-compassionate people tend to be highly self-motivated, energetic, and more successful. Their best trait is they love themselves in every condition. Self-kindness means acting in kind ways towards ourselves. For example, when you miss a deadline, don’t criticize yourself. Rather be supportive and warm to yourself.
To practice self-kindness, first, end the war inside yourself. Everyone faces trouble, negativity, and disappointments in their lives. And, it’s ok!
Think of your difficult thoughts as valuable data to improve yourself. Accept all your feelings, even when these are negative. For example, if you feel frustrated at work, ask yourself, “Why am I feeling frustrated?”
Question your uncomfortable feelings, and eventually, you will develop a greater perspective about yourself.
Practice meditation and mindfulness to help manage and avoid stress.
Avoid a Need for Perfection
We all are in the rat race of becoming perfect than our peers. But have to ever read this:
“Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life.” – Anne Lamott
Perfectionism lives in fears of making mistakes. Due to these fears, you often fail to make informed decisions and good choices. You maintain your perfectionism when other people give you worth. Their reliance on your opinions gives a sense of your value.
To let go of perfectionism and develop a strong sense of self, you first need to create a good-enough mindset.
Next, build self-reliance! Nobody is born with self-reliance; it’s developed over time. Finally, learn to let go of things. Move on and forget experiences that keep you from accepting who you are. And, once you get rid of the ‘to be perfect” thoughts, you’ll be able to achieve a work-life balance.
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