Five Ways to Improve Your Work-Life Balance (Without Changing Jobs)

I once went searching for images of work-life balance to accompany a presentation I was giving. Do you know what I found? Countless clip art images, usually of women, in precarious positions: a woman perched on a teeter totter with a work computer on one side and a treadmill on the other, a woman on a tightrope holding onto a balancing pole with an office computer dangling on one end and dumbbells on the other, and my favorite (see above), a seated woman with six arms performing various personal and professional tasks. These images suggest that the only people up to the monumental task of balancing work and life are 4-armed circus performers who dabble in yoga and teeter-tottering.

And you know what? It’s true. The way we have framed work-life balance makes it impossible to achieve, and if I’m honest, even undesirable. The ideal of balance has been a staple in Western thought since Aristotle, but Aristotle didn’t have to contend with the pressures of the 21st century workplace. Balance as a metaphor for well-being implies a fragile and precarious state that requires constant vigilance and allows little room for error. And falling off a teeter totter or a tightrope is a calamitous event that does not afford an easy recovery.

Work-life balance continues to be elusive (and even stressful) because of the persistence of grind culture, which rewards activity and perceived commitment over productivity and encourages employees to stay connected at all hours. And don’t let remote work (or what’s left of it) fool you. One of the biggest misconceptions about work-life balance is that remote work magically fixes it, but this couldn’t be further from the truth. If employees are overloaded and work in an environment that discourages disconnecting, remote work just means they get to be overworked in their own home rather than in an office.

You can’t control all the factors that influence your work-life balance, but you can shift your mindset about what it is and what it means to you. Here are five tips to achieve a better work-life balance without changing your employer:

1. Focus on how you feel.  

The balance metaphor implies that everything in your life has equal priority all the time, but work-life balance is a feeling, not a formula. It’s unrealistic to expect that you will feel more balanced if you work for X hours per day, or have X hours of personal time available per day. Our professional and personal lives are always changing, and we have to make adjustments here and there.  Instead of focusing on hours, ask yourself how you feel. Do you feel overwhelmed at work most of the time? Do you feel like you are unable to say yes to things that matter to you on a consistent basis? If the answer is no, even if you are putting in 50 hours per week at work, your schedule is working for you. If the answer to either of these questions is no, then it is time to reassess.

2. Don’t compare yourself to others. 

Work-life balance is individual. Your personal and professional choices depend on your unique circumstances, goals, and values, and they will change over time. You do not know what is happening in other people’s lives. You do not know what their living situation is. Maybe the reason your co-worker is online after hours is because she had a dentist’s appointment earlier in the day.

Comparing what you do to what others do is not helpful and it rarely leads to positive self-talk. NEVER question your own choices based on what you perceive others to be doing (or not).

3. Avoid superhero syndrome. 

It’s easy to fall into an exceptionalist mindset, fooling yourself into thinking that if you just work efficiently enough or don’t take any breaks, you will be able to accomplish an inhuman amount of work. You may be able to keep this up for a few weeks, or maybe even a few months, but you will ultimately burn out if you do not recognize the natural limits of human productivity. You can and should go above and beyond in exceptional circumstances, but not all the time. 

4. Give each day a purpose.

Are you hoping that one day you will leave work and feel like you’ve done enough? Do you consistently stay at work to finish up “just one more thing” so that you can get a head start on tomorrow’s work? And how is that working for you?

To-do lists are like the universe–they are constantly expanding. To curb guilty feelings about not doing everything, I like to give each day a purpose. This is different from a to-do list. I ask myself what I hope to do to feel accomplished that day. For example, if I am going to attend a workshop, I declare that the purpose of the day is professional development. Why is that important? Because when I feel frustrated at the end of the day that my inbox is still full, I can return to the purpose of the day and feel fulfilled.

I use it for work and play. There are days when the purpose of the day is to have fun with my kids. If I feel guilty about not doing work that day, I tell myself, the purpose of this day is not work.

5. Step away when you think you can’t.

This is the easiest to say and the hardest to do, but I speak from experience. I have not followed this advice in the past, and what usually happens is that I sit in front of the computer for long hours not getting very much done. In contrast, the times that I have stepped, I have been surprised at how, with fresh perspective, what seemed like an endless pile of work was not nearly as impossible as it had seemed. Fatigue takes a toll on your ability to size work and think of creative solutions, so the times that you feel hopeless about getting your work done are the times to step away. The walls of a home office can easily start to close in on you, so get outside and take a walk, exercise–whatever takes you to your happy space.  

No disrespect to Aristotle, but it’s time for us to find a more realistic metaphor to reflect the relationship between professional and personal fulfillment. Until we do, we will always feel like the odds are stacked against us.