Juggling Work and Family: 5 Ways to Better Balance

The phrase 'balancing work and family' has become a bit of an empty mantra for many of our clients who are struggling to maintain harmony between their professional and personal lives.

Who amongst us really feels like work and life are truly “balanced” on any given day?

By striving after that ideal we are often setting ourselves up for disappointment, because life’s demands come in unpredictable spurts and surges.

Getting the balance right means we are neglecting neither work or family needs over time, sometimes over a whole lifetime.

Being responsive to the flow of our changing situation and accepting that priorities will shift and change and understanding that everything has its season, is difficult to do.

We live in an age that views life as nothing more than an amalgamation of data points and the world as some sort of machine.

Technological advancements complicate things further by blurring the lines between work and home, making it more important than ever before that we find ways to allow our attention to flow dynamically between these two aspects of our life.

Although it’s a delicate balance to strike, there are some practical insights that can help us meet the challenge of balancing work and family life by allocating time, energy, and attention to both professional and personal responsibilities, whilst also nurturing our own physical and emotional needs.

Protect What’s Important

A keystone for balancing work and family is to set clear priorities and then create boundaries to make sure these priorities get the attention that they need.

Prioritising tasks helps us to allocate our limited time and energy wisely.

In the busy rush of life it is easy to forget that not everything needs our immediate attention.

Creating and then guarding the boundaries between our work and personal time stops our work from creeping in and pulling our attention away from important moments in relationships that matter.

Letting work colleagues and loved ones know where the boundaries lie and insisting that they respect them (even if that causes them some inconvenience) is critical if we are going to train others and ourselves to respect our time.

And although it is a cliche to say that time is precious, it can’t be overstated because all that our lives are made up of is only time.

Finite, irretrievable time.

Getting a clear overview on how our time is spent (or stolen) gets easier if we create structures.

It prevents time being wasted by procrastination and unnecessary decision making for one, and it makes those important boundaries easier to communicate and protect.

If we actively schedule in not only work hours, but also family activities, personal relaxation time, and where sleep fits in, then meeting all these competing needs happens with more ease, rather than scrabbling around always at the last minute, struggling not to let important things fall by the wayside.

Using the holy trinity of a calendar, a masterlist and a daily jobs to-do list - all separate entities that speak to each other - bakes in the structure you need. (More on this in our blog Freeing up Your Time: A Simple Guide)

Reject Rigidity

Since the lockdowns, flexible work hours, compressed workweeks and doing more work from home, has allowed work hours and family hours to become more integrated.

This makes schedules that encompass both personal and work activities even more essential as without those hard borders, family demands bleed into work time and vice versa.

This leads to our attention being pulled in numerous directions at once, creating a distracted and unfulfilling experience of the day, and causing unnecessary stress.

Team Work Makes the Dream Work

We need to bin the belief that if we can’t take everything on single-handedly then we are somehow failing at life. One of the biggest obstacles to balancing work and family life are the unrealistic expectations and unnecessary pressure we pile on ourselves with unhelpful beliefs like that one.

Delegation is not a cop out; it is a powerful tool that not only helps us to balance work and family life but also signifies that we are in the driver’s seat and that we have the insight and agency to organise our environment to support our needs, instead of being tossed about passively by all the demands being placed upon us.

When you are in a bottleneck, for example a number of unexpected and urgent things are happening in your personal life (and are taking up a lot of bandwidth), then delegating tasks to capable colleagues, especially if the work is aligned to their natural strengths, is fine. It is part of a healthy, reciprocal work relationship where we will naturally repay the favour.

Equally, asking family, friends, or even hired help to pitch in at critical times will ease the pressure and make everything seem that much more possible to cope with.

Sharing household tasks out more evenly on a permanent basis with kids and partners is an idea worth exploring too.

Less Can Be More

The term 'balancing work and family' sounds like it’s about the equal distribution of time; it’s not. It’s about quality over quantity.

Spending good quality time with family and friends involves being present, engaged, and attentive. SO PUT AWAY THE SMARTPHONE.

Merely switching it to silent or even off is not enough. To completely remove its distracting power, research has shown, the device needs to be clean out of sight.

The conundrum is that we associate smartphones with sociability, so sharing videos and taking funny pictures feel like effortless ways to connect…

But how much personal connection is really going on in those moments?

Not to say never do it, but you could be watching that TikTok or laughing at a face filter with anyone.

These interactions are pretty impersonal, and if we’re honest, they’re not about the person we are with, they are about the content of our phone.

Similarly, at work, when we stay focused on high-priority tasks and create processes that make us more productive, the hour or two that frees up each week adds up to a full work day of extra time each month. And how often do we feel like there’s just not enough days in the week?

With a few changes to how we work, we can create extra days-worth of time out of non-wasted hours. It’s not about the number of hours we spend working, it’s about how much important stuff we can get done with each hour.

It’s All About You

Balancing work and family is never going to be a one-size-fits-all magic-bullet.

It takes a patient, persistent, experimental approach to discover which strategies work best for you personally, and how to apply those strategies successfully.

Only you know what matters most to you and only you understand the true nature of the constraints that you are working under. So an individualised approach that takes these things into consideration is needed.

It can be helpful to discuss your ideas about balancing work and family with your loved ones and trusted colleagues, as their support and understanding, not to mention their ideas, can help you succeed in creating a more harmonious, integrated life.

Not Without Challenge

Balancing work and family is a continuous process with its own challenges.

Guilt is a common emotion that many people experience when they start taking steps to improve how they meet competing demands.

Know that these feelings are normal, expect them, acknowledge them, experience them, but don’t let them dictate your course of action, because your work and personal life depends upon you being energised, non-stressed and remaining as healthy as possible.

Putting the need for balance first serves others as well as yourself.

By prioritising, managing time, seeking support, and valuing quality over quantity, you can enrich your experience of living and the contribution you make and the ongoing process of balancing work and family becomes something that is fluid and dance-like, instead of an unending sense of not getting it right.

Try some of these techniques out for the next six weeks, keep a written log as you do so, and notice how the experience of balancing work and family can transform itself into something much more manageable in a relatively short space of time.