In This Article
Your hours get set by the people around you. Here's how to renegotiate them, plus 21 work-life balance tips that survive a busy week.
Say you answer one email at 9:40 on a Tuesday night. Ninety seconds, then back to your show.
Three weeks later the Tuesday-night questions are arriving on purpose—because you’re the one who answers them.
Your hours get set a little at a time, by the specific people who’ve learned what to expect from you. Which means the fix is a conversation with those people, and there’s research on how to have it.
What Is Work-Life Balance?
Work-life balance is the split between your professional responsibilities and everything else: your health, your relationships, the hours that belong to you. Definitions usually stop there, which makes it sound like a scheduling problem you can solve on your own. Your schedule has other people’s hands on it.
When you’re out of balance, you might be approaching burnout. Being burnt out is like using a tech device and never letting the battery level get above 30%. Except your phone works just as well at 30% as 100%. But when you’re burnt out, your 30% efforts are far less effective.
Plenty of people are running at 30%. In 2021, 52% of workers1 reported feeling burnt out.
So what’s actually happening? Work on consulting teams describes what’s called a cycle of responsiveness2: you answer a message quickly, the person on the other end learns you’re reachable, their expectation resets to the new speed, and everyone around them adjusts to that.
Nobody issues an instruction. The baseline just climbs.
It’s also why the 9pm phone rule never lasts. That rule belongs to one person, inside an agreement several people had already made.
Medical Disclaimer: We are honored to help you find a better work-life balance! If you are struggling to find the help you need, please note that all content found on this website is not to be considered professional medical advice. It is always best to consult a doctor or licensed therapist with questions or concerns about your physical or mental health. Check out Mental Health America’s helpful list of therapists.
21 Tips to Achieve True Work-Life Balance
The first eight are about the conversation, because that’s the part that sets how many hours you’re working in the first place. The thirteen after that are about protecting the time once you’ve got it.
1. Find Out Who Actually Sets Your Hours
Before you ask anyone for anything, work out who you’d be asking.
Think about the last three times work ran past the hour you meant to stop. Who was on the other end? Often it’s one or two people: a manager who sends things at 6pm, a client five hours ahead, a colleague who cc’s you into everything.
You probably thought of someone just then.
Your workweek gets shaped by a handful of named people whose expectations you’ve been quietly meeting. Industry and job title matter less than that short list.
Action Step: Write down the two or three names. That list is who this conversation is with.
2. Ask to Move Your Hours Before You Ask to Cut Them
The shape of the request changes the answer.
In one experiment, people evaluated employees who asked for flexible work more negatively than employees who asked for nothing at all. And among those who did ask, requests to work from somewhere else drew worse evaluations than requests to work at different times3.
If shifting when you work is the easier ask, start there.
Pro Tip: That experiment compared working somewhere else against working at different times. It never tested asking for fewer total hours, so treat “timing before volume” as a reasonable inference rather than a proven finding.
Action Step: Write your first ask as a change of when. Save the how-much for a later conversation.
3. Say What the Time Is For
The same experiment found the stated reason mattered too. Requests made for childcare reasons were evaluated more positively than requests made for reasons unrelated to childcare3.
Worth knowing the uncomfortable part: it didn’t land evenly. Men asking to work from home to care for a child were evaluated better than men asking for non-childcare reasons, and better than women making that exact same request.
So a reason helps. It just doesn’t help everyone by the same amount, and no article can fix that for you.
Action Step: Name the specific commitment your time is going to, in one sentence, before you name the hours you want.
4. Ask for a Trial Run With an End Date
A permanent change is a big decision for a manager. A six-week experiment is a small one.
Ask with a review date attached and you’ve moved the conversation from “will this work forever” to “shall we find out.” You’ve also given yourself a natural moment to renegotiate, so the next conversation is already on the calendar.
Action Step: Put an end date in the ask. “Could we try this until the end of March and review it then?”
5. Make It an Agreement Between Colleagues
A rule you hold alone is easy to drop quietly in a busy week. When two people are holding it, someone else notices when it slips.
One consulting firm’s time-off experiment required each consultant on a project team to take one planned night off a week2, and the group met weekly to check it was actually happening. The team carried the arrangement together, so no one was defending their evening on their own.
Action Step: Bring one colleague into your arrangement this week. Tell them what you’re protecting and ask them to cover the gap.
6. Run a Ten-Minute Check Every Week
That experiment also included a weekly team meeting2 where people said out loud whether the protected time had survived the week.
An arrangement without a check like that can quietly stop being true, and nobody notices until it’s been gone a month.
Ten minutes is enough: did it hold, and what got in the way?
Action Step: Add a ten-minute recurring item to an existing team meeting. Don’t create a new meeting for it.
7. Decide Now What You Do if the Answer Is No
Some of these asks will get turned down. The moment to think about that is before you ask, while you can still choose your response.
A no is information. It tells you whether the constraint is your manager, their manager, a client contract, or a norm nobody has actually checked. That last one is the easiest thing on the list to change, and it’s more common than it sounds.
So ask what would need to be true for the answer to be yes. That question turns a refusal into a set of conditions, and conditions can be worked on.
Action Step: Before the conversation, write one sentence: “If they say no, I’ll ask what would need to change.”
8. Propose a Flex Day
This is where the first seven turn into one concrete ask.
A single flexible day gives you room to handle the things that don’t fit a 9-to-5, without renegotiating your whole week. It’s also the smallest version of the ask, which makes it the easiest one to say yes to.
Put the pieces together: move the hours around first, say what the day is for, attach a review date, and bring one colleague in so the day survives a busy week.
Action Step: Ask for one flexible workday a week, with a date a month or two out to review how it went.
That’s the negotiation. The next thirteen are about the time itself, once you’ve got some.
They’re smaller, and they’re probably the part you’re already trying. Worth saying plainly: none of them will hold if the hours around them keep climbing, which is why they come second. And if what you’re after is a proper break from screens, there’s a whole guide to doing a digital detox.
9. Solo Adventure Day
This tip is the #1 most important foundation of my self-care practice.
For the past seven years, I’ve taken one day every week where I do no work and make no social plans.
It’s just a day to do self-care, go on adventures, and have fun. Sometimes I go on hikes, sometimes I go dancing at clubs, sometimes I lay in bed. The point is to do whatever I need to rebalance that day.
Give it a shot yourself and see if it helps you decompress.
Action Step: Plan a “Solo Adventure Day” sometime this month, where you visit a new place, try a new activity, or spend the day doing what you love, all by yourself.
10. Coworking Club
Spending a day working in the same space as friends or family who are also working can create a sense of community and shared productivity, motivating and making work more enjoyable.
You can do this in person or over Zoom.
I meet weekly over Zoom with my “productivity friend” to chat for a few minutes and then work for two hours. It’s a great way to stay in touch and to motivate each other. I look forward to it every week!
Action Step: Plan a “coworking day” some time this month with friends or family members who also have work to do.
11. Hobby Hour
When was the last time you painted, sang, or played chess? Whatever your go-to activity, spending time on hobbies enriches your life and adds a layer of fulfillment outside work.
Action Step: Dedicate one hour this week to a hobby you love but never have time for. Block it in your calendar like an important meeting.
12. Walkie-Talkie Meetings
Taking a call on your feet gets you outside and moving without costing you a work slot. It also changes the texture of the conversation, since people tend to talk differently when they’re walking.
Action Step: Make some of your calls while taking a walk. Get fresh air and exercise while also ticking off a work task.
Consider setting up an exercise bike next to your desk to add some cardio to your workday.
13. Plan a Weekend Vacay
There’s something about leaving home and immersing in a different environment that refreshes your energy and creativity.
Plus, if you do it on the weekend, you can avoid taking vacation days.
If you’re running on empty, the most restorative trips are usually the ones with little stimulation, like time in nature, or the ones where you don’t have to cook or clean, like a retreat or a bed and breakfast.
Action Step: Plan a 2-day vacation for some weekend in the next month or two.
14. Joy Budget
If you struggle with feelings of financial scarcity, you might feel hesitant ever to spend money on yourself and enlivening experiences.
But the reality is that allocating funds specifically for enjoyable experiences can be a form of self-care!
Action Step: Create a “fun budget” every month and make sure you spend a certain amount of money on experiences, not things. This can be as small as $20 a week. This can cover movies, theme park tickets, or even a small vacation if you can save enough.
If the budget is the problem this month, a free version works too. Keep a folder of things that reliably lift you, like this collection of positive quotes.
15. Generosity Budget
Setting aside money for acts of kindness benefits others and can boost your emotional well-being and sense of community connection.
One Harvard Business School study4 found that giving money to other people lifted participants’ happiness more than if they spent it on themself (even if they predicted the opposite).
Action Step: Create a “Generosity Budget” each month to donate to a cause you care about, tip a service worker exceptionally well, or treat a friend.
16. Email Office Hours
This one is really tip 2 in miniature: you’re telling people when the answers arrive.
Setting specific times to manage your emails can drastically reduce the stress of constant notifications and help you regain control over your workday. This way, your emails won’t seep through every crack of your day.
Action Step: If it’s acceptable in your office, specify a one- or two-hour window in your email signature for when you’ll be checking emails, and stick to it. If this is too little, set aside 2 hours a day where you do NOT check email to at least dedicate 2 hours a day for deep work time.
Here’s productivity-meister Tim Ferriss explaining how well this tactic can work.
17. Lunch Meditation
Taking a moment to express gratitude for your food and then eating the first three bites mindfully can enhance your eating experience and give you a mini-mental break during your workday.
Action Step: Before starting your meal, take five seconds to feel grateful that you have food to eat, for all the hands that went into each food item, and for the nourishment it provides. Then, fully enjoy your first three bites—savoring the taste, texture, and aroma.
Here’s a short video of the late Thich Nhat Hanh explaining how to eat mindfully.
18. Life-Logging
Before you can renegotiate your hours, it helps to know where they currently go. It’s easy to be wrong about this, and not by a little.
Keeping a log of your daily activities can offer surprising insights into how you spend your time, allowing you to make data-driven decisions for a more balanced life.
This way, you can discern if you want to spend 7 hours of your weekly spare time on the dad jokes subReddit. (And no shade on Reddit. I love that site! But you get the point. The more you know about how you use your time, the more agency you can bring to it).
Action Step: Start a “Life Log” for one week, jotting down how you spend each hour. I’ve found the app Timeular to be easy and effective. Review the log at the end of the week to identify patterns and make adjustments for a better work-life balance.
The point isn’t to beat yourself up for not being productive enough—downtime is important! It’s more to get a clear assessment of your days.
19. Breathwork Breaks
In one small trial, 40 adults were split into two groups, and the one that practiced deep breathing over eight weeks reported less negative mood afterwards5. Forty people is not many, so hold it lightly.
I had one stretch last year where I felt particularly burnt out. To get through it, I set a timer for, and I kid you not, every five minutes throughout my entire work day to take ten breaths and get back into my body.
That level of interruption isn’t sustainable, but find a pace that could work for you.
Action Step: Schedule three slots tomorrow for 5-minute breathwork breaks. You can check out this list for some easy breathing activities.
20. Skill Swap
One study spent three months comparing two kinds of leisure in older adults. One group learned something genuinely new and demanding, quilting or digital photography. The other did pleasant but undemanding things: socializing, easy puzzles6.
That’s a useful distinction when you’re deciding what to do with an evening you just fought for. Rest and challenge are different things, and the easy option is not automatically the restorative one.
Action Step: This weekend, swap skills with a friend or family member. Teach them something you can do and let them teach you something they can.
21. Intentional Daydreaming
This one has also been huge for me. Several years ago, I watched this instructional video on the “Do Nothing Meditation” from meditation master Shinzen.
This practice helped me realize I had spent all my waking hours in “go mode.” Even when I was meditating, I was straining, focusing, and trying to get somewhere. Nowhere in my day was I making time to do nothing. This epiphany kickstarted my journey of learning how to rest.
Allowing your mind to wander intentionally can stimulate creativity and offer a break from mental fatigue.
Action Step: Allocate 5-10 minutes for “intentional daydreaming.” Close your eyes and let your mind wander. The instruction in Shinzen’s practice is simple: whenever you notice an intention to control your attention, let that intention go.
We spend so much of our days controlling and dictating our minds. It can be nice to let it run free for a few moments.
Why Does Work-Life Balance Matter?
If your work-life balance is out of whack, then you’ll probably relate to some of these pains:
- Fatigue. The dishes will feel like a massive task. Making simple decisions outside of work feels exhausting.
- Losing track of time. When work starts to gobble up your weekends and evenings, it might begin to feel like your entire life is on the work clock
- Relationships suffer. When you’re not working, you’re recovering from working. Your friendships are slowly decaying
- Missing life moments. Maybe you missed a friend’s birthday, your child’s soccer game, or Mother’s Day. When work gets too big, it’s hard to keep track of the other stuff
Notice what those last two have in common. The cost of a long week lands on named people who noticed you weren’t there.
But if you can manage the tricky task of dialing in your work-life balance, then you can look forward to the following:
- Feeling like yourself again. The version of you that has opinions about things other than work
- Strong relationships. With more time on your hands, you can prioritize family and friends
- More productive. With more energy, you can accomplish tasks more effectively within a shorter time frame
- Personal and spiritual growth. Having more free time will enable you to spend more quality time with yourself
The 4 Biggest Challenges People Face When Trying to Achieve Work-Life Balance
Tips 1 through 8 assume you’re willing to have the conversation. What stops people is usually smaller than a boss who says no.
Difficulty Saying No
It can be hard to say no. Many of us say yes to social plans we’re not excited about, agree to help a friend move when we don’t have time, and take on every work project that comes our way.
If you never say no to others’ requests, it can be nearly impossible to say yes to yourself. The habit of saying yes to everything is a fast track to an overloaded schedule that leaves little time for self-care or family.
Actionable Tip: Try to respond to every offer (both personal and professional) with “Let me get back to you in the next 24 hours.”
Try this for a week. Don’t say “yes” to anything right away. Take some time to reflect on if it’s something you have the capacity (and desire) to take on.
If the refusal itself is the hard part, we go much deeper on the scripts in how to say no.
Fear of Missing Out on Work Opportunities
It can be difficult to disconnect from work if you are afraid that doing so might cause you to miss opportunities. You might fear missing out on a new project, a promotion, or simply the chance to impress the boss.
Actionable Tip: Try making a “FOMO fund.”
Add money to this fund whenever you successfully ignore the urge to give into FOMO—like skipping an unnecessary work event to enjoy personal time. At the end of each month, use whatever money is in that fund to indulge in something that genuinely makes you happy and contributes to your work-life balance.
Feeling Guilt Over Prioritizing Self-Care
The societal emphasis on productivity often generates guilt when taking time out for self-care, making it seem like an indulgence rather than a necessity.
Actionable Tip: Establish a “self-care swap” with a friend or family member where you both commit to taking an hour or two for self-care each week and hold each other accountable. Knowing someone else is also taking time for themselves can help diminish your feelings of guilt.
Often, we feel bad engaging in self-care because of low self-worth. If that’s the case, you might appreciate some of the tips in this article.
Addiction to Being Busy
Many equate busyness with productivity or self-worth, making stepping away from work or activities challenging to enjoy downtime or self-care.
Being overwhelmingly busy has become a badge of honor.
Actionable Tip: Reflect on the following questions:
- What do you get out of being busy?
- What are you afraid would happen if you stopped being busy?
Here’s a terrific 16.5-minute audio essay from Tim Kreider that picks apart the United States cultural busyness trap that so many Americans (and other nationalities) have fallen into.
What Performance Reviews at One Firm Showed
Everything above assumes asking is the right move. Here’s the finding that complicates it.
Researchers spent time inside a different global consulting firm and analyzed 82 consultants7. Broadly, people fell into three groups: some fully embraced the always-on expectation, some quietly worked less than the norm without flagging it, and some openly asked to work differently.
Then the researchers looked at annual performance ratings. Among the 54 non-partner consultants rated that year, the people who’d asked openly scored lowest. The ones who quietly worked similar hours and the ones who fully embraced the expectation scored about the same as each other.
So the gap didn’t track how much anyone worked. It tracked whether they’d said anything out loud.
Which is a rough thing to learn about the place you work. The paper’s own conclusion is blunt: the firm “did not appear to distinguish between those who embraced and those who passed.”
The people who’d asked openly fared worse in other ways too. Of the 25 who asked openly, eight left within a year, the highest turnover in the sample. Just one had recently been promoted, and seven said they hadn’t got promotions they’d expected.
There’s also the consultant who took six weeks of unpaid leave. He was told the firm couldn’t properly evaluate him because of the gap in his year, his rating dropped from a 3 to a 2, and he missed a promotion he’d hoped for. His summary afterwards: “No one questioned my commitment until I had a family.”
Two things before you draw a conclusion from that. This is one firm, watched in the field with no control group, and people chose which group they were in. And the effect didn’t repeat: the differences that year were statistically significant, and when the same comparison was run on the following year’s ratings, it wasn’t.
The reading that says “hide your hours” misses the point. A review system rating people on how visible their absences were is a problem with the firm. But knowing the pattern exists is what makes tips 5 and 6 worth doing: an arrangement several colleagues hold and check on weekly has people who can speak to the work, where an announcement made once upward has only itself.
There’s No Correct Split
There’s a persistent idea that some correct ratio exists. Eight hours of work, eight of rest, eight of everything else.
Worth knowing where that came from, because it wasn’t research. The formula is usually traced to Robert Owen, the Welsh-born owner of the New Lanark cotton mills in Scotland, who in 1817 started campaigning under the slogan “eight hours labour, eight hours recreation, eight hours rest”8. He was arguing against 12- and 14-hour factory shifts, and the number was a bargaining position. It took the United States until 1938 to write anything like it into law.
Which is to say: the split most of us measure ourselves against was a campaign slogan two centuries ago, aimed at a problem that isn’t yours.
So what does predict whether the split is working? One survey of 325 employees across a wide range of jobs9 measured two things: how much separation between work and home each person actually wanted, and how much their workplace gave them. Then it looked at what the gap between those predicted.
What mattered was the gap. People whose preference matched what their job supplied reported less conflict between work and home and more satisfaction with the job.
It also cut against a common assumption. Blending work and home gets sold as the flexible, modern, low-friction option. The benefit turned out to be uneven, though, and bigger in one direction than the other, so it doesn’t play out that way for everyone.
Two people in the same role can want opposite things and both be right.
Try this: Write down, in one sentence, how separate you want work and home to be. Then write what your job currently allows. The distance between those two sentences is the thing to negotiate.
Frequently Asked Questions About Work-Life Balance
How can I achieve work-life balance in my busy schedule?
Start by working out whose expectations are actually setting your hours, then book one conversation with that person. Scheduling tactics help at the margins, but a busy schedule is usually the output of what other people expect from you, so that’s the part worth changing first.
What should I do if my manager says no?
Ask what would need to be true for the answer to be yes. That turns a flat refusal into a list of conditions, and conditions can be worked on. It also tells you where the constraint actually sits, whether that’s your manager, their manager, a client contract, or a norm nobody has questioned.
How can I set boundaries between work and personal life?
Setting boundaries between work and personal life involves clearly defining and sticking to your work hours. Use rituals or cues, like changing clothes or switching off your work computer, to mark the transition from work time to personal time. We cover the full range of them in how to set boundaries.
Is there a correct work-life balance ratio?
No. A big part of what predicts whether an arrangement works is the match between how much separation you want between work and home and how much your job actually gives you. That’s different for different people, so two colleagues in the same role can want opposite things and both be fine.
How can employers support work-life balance for their employees?
Employers can support work-life balance by offering flexible work arrangements and promoting a workplace culture that values time off. Policies like flexible schedules, parental leave and remote working options help. So does something smaller: making protected time a team-level agreement with a standing check, so it isn’t left to each person to defend alone.
What are some effective time management techniques to improve work-life balance?
Effective techniques include the Pomodoro Technique, the Eisenhower Matrix or the ABCDE Priority Setting method. These help you focus on urgent and important tasks, freeing up time for personal activities. We go through 33 of them in time management tips.
Takeaways on Work-Life Balance
Here’s what to do this week.
Start by naming the person whose expectations are setting your hours right now, and book one conversation with them.
Shape your first ask as a change of when you work, and say what the time is for.
Bring one colleague into whatever you agree, so it survives the first busy week.
Put a ten-minute check on an existing team meeting, and use it to ask whether the protected time actually held.
Then write down how separate you want work and home to be, and compare that to what your job currently allows. That distance is what you’re negotiating, and it’ll change more than once.
And if you want more on making the hours you win back go further, start with this article.
