When we are feeling burned out, we long for what’s commonly dubbed “work-life balance.” A healthy work-life integration essentially means meeting your deadlines and progressing at work while still maintaining time for friends, family, and personal interests.
Understandably, we want to sleep properly and eat well. We also want to stop worrying about work when we are at home so that we can focus our energy on our relationships and hobbies. And in a world that’s rapidly shifting toward potentially toxic levels of work-life integration, maintaining balance can be difficult.
The solution? Life management through habits and boundaries. Betsy Jacobson writes: “Balance is not better time management, but better boundary management. Balance means making choices and enjoying those choices.”
Read on to learn how to start setting healthy, intentional boundaries in your life so that you can continue to thrive in today’s world of work-life integration.
What Is Work-life Integration?
Jobs today are becoming less and less uniform — especially after much of the world transitioned to remote and hybrid working during the Covid-19 pandemic.
After Covid-19, many of us work from home. We might pop in a load of laundry between meetings or log into a morning meeting in our slippers. Many of us benefit from flexible hours, meaning that we can move fluidly between work and personal time. We might take a morning off, knowing that we can make up the hours later that evening.
Slowly but surely, we’re blurring the boundary between work and personal time. Work-life integration is this seamless intermixing of work and professional responsibilities: it’s tidying the kitchen while you’re tuned into a conference call or working remotely while on an extended weekend.
In the past, we’d have called taking business calls at a baseball game overworking. Today, we call it work-life integration.
Successful work-life integration still maintains internal harmony and respects important trade-offs. But, it’s important to recognize that we all feel internal harmony differently depending on our personalities, personal life demands, work demands, and past work histories; practices that create harmony in one person could create stress in another.
As a rule, it is usually best to view life and work holistically. Our personal lives cycle continually between periods of relaxation and periods of intense stress stemming from children, aging parents, our own health, work demands, or a variety of other concerns.
We constantly sense, in particular, the tension between work and personal life as we strive to dedicate adequate time to each. As a result, we can often feel as though there are just not enough hours in the day (or days in the week). And while we rush around trying to fit more and more activities into less and less time, it is often our relationships that suffer.
Start With Yourself
When we’re frustrated with the state of our lives, it’s often tempting to shift the blame externally: we might complain of long hours or heavy workloads that force our lives into chaos. And while such complaints are certainly valid, we should also recognize that we are empowered to make lasting change in our lives — regardless of our circumstances.
To achieve a successful work-life integration, then, it’s imperative that we start internally. Start with these five habits and boundaries:
Pause and Evaluate
Be still long enough to take a deep breath and evaluate what you are feeling during the current period of your life. Consider what you want and need both at work and in your personal life, and then articulate those things in a journal or document. Articulate also your victories and frustrations.
This process gives you greater clarity and a greater sense of control over your life as you recognize trends in your successes, failures, and needs. As you observe your feelings, you’ll be able to assess whether or not your current work-life integration is working for you — and how it might need to change.
Prioritize Your Responsibilities
Build on the list that you’ve created above by adding tasks. Which of those tasks are most important? Prioritize everything on your list from most to least important.
Consider not just your daily tasks but also those for the week and month(s) ahead. Write them down and use your time accordingly — and don’t forget to prioritize your personal needs. “Exercise,” for example, is just as worthy of your attention as a work deadline.
Set Blocks of Time for Different Tasks
Work-life integration doesn’t mean to do every thing every day. Rather than allowing your focus to be divided in myriad ways at once, set specific blocks of time for similar responsibilities.
For example, set one block of time to check and respond to messages, another for meetings, and another to do task work. When setting up these blocks, consider when you are personally more productive, then use those periods of time for tasks that require more creativity and energy.
Things like calling and returning messages, for example, usually don’t require much brain power, so they can be left for “useless” times (like the post-lunch slump). Use productivity hacks like a Pomodoro timer to work in short, focused bursts. Block out all other distractions so you can make the most of your time.
Take Time Off
Work-life integration should never mean that you’re constantly working. In fact, taking time off is an essential part of healthy work-life integration — and one that’s easy to overlook given the hyperconnectivity of today.
Time off can be anything from a five-minute break to an official work-free vacation; the important thing is simply that you take time off (and we mean completely disconnected) to rest your body and mind. You might be tempted to keep working — many Americans seem to be.
In 2018, well before the Covid-19 pandemic, the U.S. workforce left 768 million vacation days unused. Added up, that’s $65.5 billion in unused funding from the 55% of Americans who didn’t use that vacation time.
In 2016, records indicate that 746,000 people in the U.S. died from heart disease and strokes attributable to long working hours. The phrase, “worked to death” isn’t just a joke — it’s a real thing.
Volunteer
Serving others is a great refresher. While it might feel impossible to devote time externally when you’re drowning in your own responsibilities, research has proven that volunteering reaps worthwhile benefits.
According to scholars at the University of California, Berkeley, regular volunteers exhibit better mental health, higher levels of happiness, better social connections, and increased leadership capacities.
Manage Responsibly
If you work in a leadership role, you play an important role in creating a balanced environment for the employees under your supervision. If you’d like to up your team’s productivity, consider promoting healthy work-life integration practices.
You may be surprised by how your team’s productivity increases as you actively prioritize your employees’ mental well-being. In particular, be sure to prioritize things like communication and involvement:
- Talk about goals. Know what your employees are striving for. Not everyone has the same work-life integration goals, so talk to all of your employees individually about their objectives. Then, determine what you can do to help them achieve a balance that will benefit both their mental health and productivity.
- Encourage a culture of openness. This will allow your employees to speak up if they feel that they’re under too much pressure or that their current schedule isn’t working for them. Some employees may benefit from working remotely a couple of days each week, while others may prefer altering their daily work schedule. It’s important to be open-minded and flexible to keep productivity and morale high.
- Set a good example. Make sure you are a good role model — your employees follow your lead. Are you mindful about your own work-life integration? What do you do on the weekend? Your personal example sends signals about what you expect from your employees.
- Encourage breaks. Give time off, vacations, and comp time as your firm allows. Encourage those under your care to take advantage of these opportunities to recharge and maintain a healthy balance in their lives.
- Be involved. Continually monitor your team members’ workloads to make sure they are realistic and achievable. If you find that employees are feeling the need to over
- Communicate. Listen carefully to your employees to make sure that you are correctly understanding their needs. Ask employees questions about their work-life integration and pay attention to signs that they might not have a healthy balance between work and personal time.
Implementing these changes takes time, so don’t feel discouraged if you don’t see differences in your team right away. Work consistently with your team and don’t be afraid to ask team members how they feel about your firm’s work-life integration practices.
Practice for Perfection
The concept of work-life integration is one that’s relatively new — and it’s constantly evolving. With all of that change, it is still quite possible to maintain a balanced work-life integration! Don’t expect change to come all at once. Lasting change takes time, and learning the balance and techniques that work for you will take effort and motivation.
But, no matter how motivated we are to succeed, remember that none of us are exempt from becoming out of balance. We must continually monitor ourselves and be intentional about our choices. This is far beyond just good time management; this is life management.
How do you feel about work-life integration? What methods have you used to maintain balance? Let me know in the comments!