Create a Work-Life Balance Using Online Tools for Enhanced Efficiency
Staying sane, happy, and healthy despite having a full calendar has become an uphill battle. Even if you live and breathe your job, making the time to spend with friends and family, indulge in a hobby, catch up on a TV show, or just procrastinate, is vital to your well-being and productivity at work.
Even seemingly mundane tasks, like a looming deadline or a last-minute meeting, add up and prevent you from focusing on work or enjoying your pastime.
Achieving a work-life balance is difficult, whether you are a public sector employee, an entrepreneur running a result-driven web design agency, a freelancer, or a student. It can be especially hard to attain it, which is among the leading business hubs, talent pipelines, and innovation destinations in the US.
Once in a while, we all need a helping hand in budgeting our time wisely and maintaining a balance between personal life and hectic work schedules.
Ensuring work-life balance is an endeavour, but luckily, modern times have yielded plenty of innovative apps and gadgets to help us keep our priorities in check.
Read on to discover the best work-life balance platforms and tools that will help improve your work efficiency and allow you to revel in your leisure time.
Have you ever faced distractions at work?
What Is Work-Life Balance — And Why Does It Matter?
Business News Daily beautifully defined work-life balance as “the state of equilibrium where a person equally prioritizes the demands of one’s career and the demands of one’s personal life.”
Work and private life are bidirectional; a stressful work environment can affect the quality of your mental and physical health and, vice versa, bothersome personal circumstances can detriment your work performance.
As (dis)satisfaction about one of these aspects inevitably pours into and impacts the other, it is crucial that you strive for a healthy and balanced relationship between your career and private life.
Achieving an optimum balance between both spheres of life makes you more motivated to work, refreshed and energized to exercise and improve your social life, and overall, allows you to focus on the tasks at hand and make sounder decisions.
Moreover, a good work-life balance allows you to fulfill all the important life roles to the best of your ability, whether it’s the role of an employee, entrepreneur, parent, sibling, spouse, friend, etc.
Finally, and above all, the most important role is your own. Through a good work-life balance, you will be able to make time for your mental and physical well-being.
Online Platforms to Leverage to Get on Top of Your Work-Life Balance
Now that you know why work-life balance is important, let’s dive into the solutions to help you strike a balance between time at the office desk and time away.
In the following section, we’ll cover apps, tools, and gadgets that will allow you to keep things in check and make work-life balance a reality.
Discover Your Work-Life Balance Pain Points
The first step towards achieving a work-life balance is to assess your current job-time/free-time ratio.
Start by tracking your daily routine and analyzing how you actually spend your days. For instance, do you frequently work extra hours in the office or bring work home? Do you spend plenty of your leisure time on social media?
Knowing how your days go by, will empower you to make wise work-life balance decisions and transition towards an effective and positive ratio of working to relaxing.
If you are keen to spot issues in your daily routine, try out time-tracking apps such as TimeTune for Android and ATracker for iOS.
A Single Solution to Organize Your Work and Private Life
Whether it’s planning your time or staying on top of your schedule, having all the details in one place—and accessible across devices—is key to maintaining a healthy work-life balance.
For example, apps such as Evernote and Cozi are great companions to cover all the bases, from tracking your calendar and appointments, to managing your to-do lists and shopping lists, and running a journal or a recipe book.
Another amazing app is Conjure which provides you with behavior-tracking, for both personal and professional habits. Whether it’s tracking project progress or time spent with family, at the gym, or doing hobbies, Conjure enables you to keep an eye on your day-to-day work-life balance.
In addition, apps like Weekly Planner or Week Plan allow you to plan your week using effective scheduling features. From routine tasks like household chores, grocery shopping, and exercise to outdoor activities, meet-ups with friends, or self-improvement, these apps help remind you to keep those promises to yourself.
Did you know you can easily show your colleagues when you're busy?
Gain Control Over Your Connectivity
Thanks to smartphones, we are now more connected than ever before. Work emergencies can reach us anytime and anywhere, and personal matters can intrude on our time at work.
Both are bad and can impair the quality of your career/personal life. Luckily, modern times have yielded tools and gadgets to empower us to regain control over when and where we are available to others.
Meet Space and Forest, smartphone apps that give you control over your digital life. Space helps you gain an understanding of your phone usage by monitoring which apps you use and for how long. Likewise, Forest helps in beating phone addiction and focusing on outside-of-phone tasks by disabling your phone usage for a set time.
Interesting connectivity and productivity solutions come from Luxafor, who have developed a range of do-not-disturb lights and gadgets that signal your availability to coworkers in real-time.
Diverse physical and digital tools allow you to get things done more easily and efficiently, saving you time and energy to focus on the tasks at hand.
Luxafor Flag busy light
Eliminate distractions;
Achieve deep work by controlling your workflow.
A Better Work-Life Balance Through Stress Management
Busy work schedules, conflicts at work or home, daily commutes, financial worries, health issues—all these and so much more are common causes of stress nowadays.
Thankfully, you can leverage tools like Pacifica that offer mood monitoring, meditation features, journaling options, and wellness tracking—all to help you successfully manage any stressful situation across your work and personal life.
LUXAFOR HELPS PEOPLE TO ACHIEVE THEIR GREATEST PRODUCTIVITY LEVELS WITH A WIDE VARIETY OF OFFICE PRODUCTS. LET’S BE PRODUCTIVE TOGETHER!
