An essential guide to achieving work-life balance in an always-on world
As a life and career coach, I believe that work-life balance isn't just important, it is critical to our happiness, well-being, fulfillment and engagement. This hasn’t always been a popular opinion, but increasingly, we are seeing that studies, statistics and anecdotal research on wellbeing in the workplace, mental health and self-reported measures of fulfillment supports this.
Although we often talk about our lives as separate components – our “personal lives” and “professional lives” – really, this is a construct that is disconnected with how we actually operate in the world. We’re humans with lives that encompass a variety of roles, responsibilities, commitments, dreams and desires.
How we are being in one area of our life will always impact how we show up in another area of life, whether that’s subtly or overtly. What’s happening at home impacts how we show up for our work and how we perform at work impacts our personal lives.
Anyone who has ever felt busy, stressed or overwhelmed can attest to this. So can any of us who has felt fully in flow or in our purpose.
What does it mean to have a healthy work-life balance?
Work-life balance has been defined in many ways. Some people view it as managing or reducing the negative impacts of work stress on your home life. Others define it as equally prioritizing your home life and work life. Still others view it as a ratio of how much time you spend on career versus personal activities.
Nearly always, we’re looking at it in terms of what workplaces are providing or expecting, and that makes sense when we think about how workplace policies and cultures can contribute to employee frustration, burnout and lack of balance over time. That is, though, also a perspective that doesn’t offer a lot of agency and control. We can’t leave well-being in the hands of workplaces to define and provide (or not). We need to lead ourselves first, and then lead within our organizations and communities.
Integrating your life and work is a highly individual equation that is about much more than hours spent here or there, or workplace expectations. Whether we feel balanced depends on how we define that for ourselves. The reality is that our responsibilities or priorities will always ebb and flow, and it’s up to us to be in the driver’s seat in how we handle them and which responsibilities and priorities we decide to take on.
There are also plenty of generational and cultural differences in how we view work-life balance, but again, the answer is often the flexibility to identify and manage our priorities. Achieving a healthy work-life balance has never been about math or about slicing lives up into perfectly weighted pieces.
A bigger picture of work-life balance includes steps that are simple, but often overlooked:
defining what matters to us at this stage in our life and career
understanding what we truly want our lives, days and career to look like
choosing to commit (and recommit as needed) to the priorities that we’ve set. The truest statement about a healthy work-life balance is that it’s a fluid state. In other words, our work-life balance grows and changes as we do, but that needs to be an intentional process.
Having a clear understanding of our innate strengths, values, personality preferences and goals can make this much easier because it offers the data we need to know what kind of work, tasks, and even work environment will bring out our best. This allows us to intentionally build a lifestyle and career that is aligned with our bigger picture life goals. When we think about balance in this way, it becomes not just attainable, but an empowering choice that better equips us to navigate the inevitable obstacles or roadblocks along the way.
Busting the work-life balance myth
We are bombarded with messages all the time telling us that work-life balance is not attainable. This is a myth with unhealthy consequences for individuals, organizations and communities. In reality, navigating that balance can sometimes be challenging. Yes, it may require learning new skills and capacities, but that’s certainly possible. Balancing your work and life in a way that feels nourishing and sustainable is a classic example of something that isn’t complex or impossible; it just may not always feel easy in practice.
Buying into cultural messages that we cannot achieve a healthy work-life balance isn’t making us happy, healthy or effective in any of the facets of our lives. It’s time to let that story go. In fact, a 2021 study by Statista showed that 60% of workers surveyed say they do effectively balance their life and work – so we can all definitely rethink that unattainable messaging. (I’ll point out, though, that half of those still reported feeling the Sunday scaries, so there is a lot of work to do on the emotional side of feeling balanced and on the side of workplace wellbeing.)
Achieving a sustainable work-life balance in the complex and ever-changing world that we live in requires that we start by rewriting another narrative as well — the story about what is within our personal control and influence — and focus time and attention there first. That means we have to assess our own individual situations, our commitments to our own priorities and well-being, and evaluate how we can set and communicate boundaries that nourish us.
Ultimately, of course, it also requires workplaces and communities to evolve in creating supportive flexible environments that enable all people to flourish. Healthy balanced people build healthy balanced cultures, and the opposite builds the opposite. That’s why leading ourselves first goes a long way to building the capacity that’s needed to be a part of the change we might want to see.
Why is work-life balance important?
Often, when I talk with new clients, they are caught up in workplace reasons that their balance is suffering. It might be their workaholic boss who expects the same of them (or their own tendencies in that regard – 48% of Americans copped to this habit in one survey). It might be the endless demands of their leadership role, a big and seemingly endless project, or a dysfunctional or high-pressure industry, an inflexible schedule or workplace culture.
All of these can be real influences on our overall wellbeing. I’ve personally experienced all of the above and have coached clients through them as well. Yet while those scenarios can cause us to lose perspective and give work a higher priority over all parts of our life, they aren’t the root causes.
Work-life balance is an incredibly effective performance and culture-building opportunity when we lead ourselves first. At the end of the day, we are the CEOs of our lives and careers, whether we’re in a leadership role or not. No one else can take responsibility to manage those things for us. We will always have some level of choice to make about the environments that we are putting ourselves into, the commitments we are making and the boundaries we are setting.
(The “quiet quitting” trend— which is not at all new— is an example of this in action.)
Sometimes, too, it’s the way that we’re working that isn’t working. We may be attaching ourselves to busy schedules, holding ourselves to impossible standards, taking on more than is reasonable or overworking in an effort to prove our worth. We may not be taking the time and effort to set meaningful priorities or clear work parameters, or have transparent conversations with the people in our personal and professional lives about what we need.
Nine times out of ten, this is an enlightening and empowering perspective shift that can spur on significant changes that do result in better work-life balance. While you cannot control your workplace or your boss, you can control you — and you can also find another job if warranted.
Living burned out, stressed out, unbalanced lives while waiting for (or even trying to create) better systems and more enlightened workplaces hasn’t been working. We need to work towards those things and take personal action at the same time. This is especially true of leaders. Leaders cannot create healthy and sustainable long-term change in organizations and communities without also embracing that change for themselves. Many workplaces are actively wanting to improve work-life balance for their employees, but many have a long way to go. That’s partly because too many people have become accustomed to lack of balance as a way of life.
Work-life balance and burnout: what the research shows
To see the destructive results of the “unattainable” myth at work, we can look at research on burnout. With the added stresses of pandemic and post-pandemic life, burnout has reached alarming levels.
One Deloitte survey revealed that 77% respondents had experienced burnout at their jobs (this was higher among millennials at 84%).
Nearly half of the respondents said they have left a job due to burnout (again, higher among millennials).
And the old adage that “if you love what you do it never feels like work” isn’t true either. Nearly 90% of those surveyed said they’re passionate about their job, yet 64% still report feeling stressed at work.
When I coach clients on career goals, reinvention and sustainable success, most tell me that work-life balance (often including flexibility and healthy work cultures) is one of their top concerns. In job search, it often tops or sits right alongside their salary or career goals. It’s often the deciding factor when leaving a job or turning down a role. Again, research shows this is a wider trend:
A UK study by CIPHER HR showed that 67% of respondents say work-life balance is more important than pay and benefits combined (remote workers were even higher).
In a survey by Statista, 72% of workers listed work-life balance as a major factor in their job searches.
79% of workers surveyed by FlexJobs say flexible workplaces help them improve their work-life balance and reduce their stress.
But it’s not all about work.
The life part of the equation is equally important, and that’s often the place where we can make the quickest and most impactful changes. Lifestyle choices, environments we operate within, building a foundation of well-being and managing home and personal stressors all play critical roles in how and whether we realistically and practically create more balance and sustainability in our life.
Work-life balance, work-life integration, work-life blend, work-life harmony… what’s the difference?
There isn’t one. Most of those who argue that we need to give up on balance are essentially calling for healthy work-life balance while giving it a different name. We get hung up on the word. Arguing over what to call it skirts the issue: if you aren’t feeling like work-life balance is accessible to you, then something needs to change before burnout is the end result.
Whether you call it work-life balance, work-life fit, work-life integration, work-life harmony, work-life blend or any other creative name that you can think of, the result is the same. It means fulfilling your commitments and priorities in the various spheres and roles of your life in a way that feels intentional, sustainable and fulfilling, as defined by you.
How you define and structure work-life balance in your life will look different for everyone – and it will likely look different at different stages of your life and career, too. The key is that you feel confidently able to perform well in your work while maintaining important relationships, practicing healthy self-care and meeting your personal commitments. Purpose isn’t lost to productivity. Having good work-life balance means that the various areas of life that are important to you are not at odds with one another or draining energy from each other, but working together in a way that does not create unhealthy levels of stress, overwhelm or conflict. (That’s not to say you’ll never experience those things, but they won’t be constant or at unhealthy levels.)
How to improve your work-life balance
How to get there depends on how (and if) you have define a clear set of criteria. The foundation of sustainable work-life balance is all about values alignment, knowing what you truly want in your life/your days/your work, and choosing to commit to those things. Once you have clear priorities for your time, energy, attention and resources, committing to those priorities means setting clear boundaries and creating the conditions for balance. In practical terms, that can require building up our boundary setting, communication and negotiations skills. That’s why it’s often a gradual path to get there, one that includes experiments and stretching our edges a bit.
Sometimes, all it takes are small tweaks to better manage your personal energy like having a consistent exercise routine, setting boundaries around established work hours, rethinking your to-do list or eliminating activities that aren’t a priority. It’s might mean prioritizing self-care a bit more, learning techniques to better manage stress or asking for more support where needed.
Sometimes, though, achieving healthy balance may require bigger changes to be true to yourself and honest about what you really need to thrive.
Here are a few places you can start to assess and improve your own work-life balance:
Adjusting your work and/or home schedule, including white space time for things like eating lunch away from your desk, setting a clear end to your workday or creating email and screen boundaries
Prioritizing your physical and mental health, and practicing evidence-based mindfulness or stress reduction techniques
Delegating or re-negotiating personal and professional tasks that are not your natural strengths so that you have more time, energy, focus and motivation for the rest
Assessing the difference between the habits that fuel you and those that drain you. Often when we’re feeling out of balance, we need to add more fuel or reduce some drains to put us back into balance.
Identifying where you need and want more support and strategizing on where and how to get that.
Taking an inventory of where you feel most and least balanced right now. What’s missing? What one change would be most impactful?
Building a felt sense of balance into our lives — feeling like we are not just all work, all the time — is attainable. It doesn’t have to be hard, but it does mean telling ourselves a different story about what it looks like to live a balanced life, why it’s important, which parts we can improve for ourselves and where we can influence wider changes.
Want more tips to improve your work-life balance? Here are 5 more practical tips to live a balanced life in the real world.
For a deeper dive with clear and actionable strategies for revitalizing your life, your career and your wellbeing, check out my books Nourish and Reinvent Your Reality.
Is it time to define – or reclaim – your unique work-life balance? Schedule an introductory coaching call and let’s assess your situation and make sustainable changes together.