Work-Life Balance: Tips From The Community

• 14 min read
• Productivity, Career, Workflow, Remote Work
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About The Author

Ricky Onsman has been a freelance web designer, developer, writer and editor for over 20 years. A former Managing Editor at SitePoint and Web Directions, he … More about Ricky ↬

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In order to encourage web professionals to consider some of the key points of their working lives in this still nascent industry, we asked folks on Twitter and Facebook to share their best work-life balance tips that worked really well for them. We received lots of responses: most very sensible, many very insightful, some quite unexpected and a few deliberately tongue-in-cheek.

The most important thing to note when thinking about work-life balance is that it is different for everyone. While there may a perfect solution for an individual in any given time, place and work situation, it is almost certain to be different for another individual – by a degree that can be tiny or enormous.

What we’re looking for, then, is not a single way of approaching work-life balance but suggestions from the community as to what works for them. You may well pick up a tip or two that positively affect your own work-life balance, and your suggestion might help someone else out.

There are overall themes and lines of thinking that emerge in our community responses, and we’ll organize them into groups for this article. I’ll also add some thoughts of my own to these, as I live and work in a situation that allows me to often do what is least recommended – but it works brilliantly for me.

Let’s work our way from the simplest and easiest to implement to the more complex and potentially challenging suggestions.

Control Your Devices

A large group of folks focused on managing devices and hardware. This makes a lot of sense. In some ways, we are fortunate to work in an industry where we not only have some truly remarkable hardware and software at our disposal – digital tools of immense power – but we can to some extent control these tools to behave in ways we’d like them to. For some, the key to a good balance between work and life lies in exercising that control.

That included simply turning them off, either partially or completely, or configuring them to be less intrusive.

Let’s see what the community had to say:

A variation on the theme of devices was to remove work software from non-work devices.

A third variation on managing devices was to physically separate yourself from work devices.

My Take: Part of my work is to provide comprehensive web services to a small portfolio of clients who pay me an annual fee to design, build, host, expand, refine and generally manage their web presence. If a client website is down, I need to fix it — pronto. If a client has a question or a task for me, I want to know what that task is ASAP. For that reason, I tend to keep my devices on – although typically silent – while I’m awake and my software configured to alert me to any notifications.

The thing is, in my situation, notifications simply allow me to decide whether to complete a task and when. If I get a text message or an email while I’m watching TV with the kids, I’ll look at it and decide whether I need to respond immediately. Ninety-nine times out of 100, it can wait. But I want to know, in case that one time in a hundred is critical and requires immediate action. Note that my clients pay a premium for this service and it’s easy for me to do.

Commit To Non-Work Activities

A different group of tips (although, as you will have noticed, there’s quite a bit of overlap between these groups) focused on making specific time for non-work activities.

The key here seems to be to make a commitment. We all have things we like to do that help us wind down, but we often let the time for that slide by while we’re busy getting work done: staying longer at the office, completing work tasks at home, and working over the weekend.

The activities themselves are varied and obviously should reflect your personal interests. Community suggestions included games, hobbies, physical exercise, meditation, children, pets and more. The main point is that they are not, by any definition, work.

My Take: This is something I agree with and generally find easy to implement. Having two teenage children helps, requiring varying levels of direct and indirect participation in a range of sporting and cultural events, but I also play some sport myself and have a couple of other structured, social leisure activities, as well as random family board games, movie nights and outings. I also have a dog, a Border Collie, and I completely agree with Erin Weigel.

Manage Your Time

Allowing, again, for overlaps, there was a distinct group of tips that focused on how we divide and use our time, on an hourly, daily, weekly or longer basis. They acknowledge that the clock doesn’t have to rule our lives but can be a good tool for achieving balance.

My Take: This is where my experience defies all or most of the tips and suggestions offered. I work from home as a freelancer, a web designer, developer, writer. My wife is a writer and editor who also works from home. We have two high school teenagers at home, and we live 100 miles or so south of the big city of Sydney, Australia. My day is a jigsaw puzzle of work tasks and home tasks, following no real schedule other than doing what needs to be done, whether it’s a client job or a household chore, each often to a non-negotiable timetable. I juggle work tasks and home tasks interchangeably. Frankly, they are just all tasks to me. Some, I get paid for. Some keep my family housed, fed, clothed, educated and entertained. It all has to be done, and it all gets done.

I must acknowledge that I have specific advantages. Having done this for over 20 years, I have put together a reliable, secure home office with all the tools I need to work. I live in a house big enough to accommodate two people working without tripping over each other. 90% of my work is done remotely (the exception being face-to-face meetings with clients), and I deliberately seek out and take such work. I’m also fortunate that I genuinely and absolutely love what I do, and how I get to do it. I doubt that I will or even could hold down a regular job again.

I do also believe that my situation is becoming increasingly common and increasingly viable for many people. A lot of those people may well find setting clear divisions between home and work tasks is beneficial, or even necessary. Others may find an approach similar to the one I use is more effective. It all depends.

Change Your Thinking

Some people offered suggestions aimed at changing the way we think about work and lowering its priority in our lives. We’re getting into the bigger picture here and, perhaps as a consequence, some of these tips will only work for some people – but they might all help you to reflect on your own situation.

My Take: Once I put myself in a position of pitching for work and undertaking several projects at once, it became necessary to think about “work” in a different way. I developed strategies and techniques that inevitably affected my work-life balance. I’m now very comfortable living a life defined not by what is work and what isn’t, but simply by what needs to be done at any given time.

Over To You

Quite a few people gave us lists that included several of the individual points made by others (you can read more of these posts on Twitter and SmashingMag’s Facebook page). We’d be delighted should you care to contribute the strategies you use to find a reasonable work-life balance.

You are also very welcome to add your tips in the comments below. We’d love to hear from you!

Further Reading

• What I Wish I Knew About Working In Development Right Out Of School
• How To Become A Better Speaker At Conferences
• Top Front-End Tools Of 2023
• Which Video Conferencing Tools Are Most Accessible?

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