Work-Life Balance: The Tactics

Let’s get something out of the way: The world is unfair. 

The way most employers approach work creates an endless stream of tasks that pile onto our plates. They’re insatiable. Unless the economy changes or our employers have a change of heart, there will always be pressure to work beyond what’s reasonable. And, yes, societal expectations for being a “good mom” versus a “good dad” are different and put undue pressure on moms. I hear you. And surely, there’s much room for more enlightened government policies to support families.

All that said, when I work as an executive coach with professionals facing work-life balance challenges, I always push the conversation toward what they can address. What can you do—today—to create a better situation for yourself? 

The goal is to acknowledge the systemic challenges while recognizing that our physical, emotional, and relationship health should not wait for society to change. Instead, we have to start where we can. 

My conversations with those clients and people in my life facing similar challenges made me curious: What do people do to optimize their work-life balance? I started by reading everything I could get my hands on—CEO biographies, parenting books, news articles—and when someone mentioned a tactic, I captured it. Later, I sent a survey to working professionals asking about their strategies for making their lives fit their work and vice versa. This content here is a summary of those inputs. 


What is “Work-Life Balance”?

For starters, there’s no single definition. The goal is not to achieve a balance where work and life outside of work take equal share of your time and attention. Instead, when I talk about work-life balance here, it means a state in which optimizing across all areas of your life feels easy. We still see the tradeoffs, but we can choose how to spend our time and attention with maximum confidence and minimum stress.  


Optimizing Balance Is Not Just About Time Management

We should think beyond how we spend our time to the character and experience of time. When I examine people’s tactics and descriptions of the emotional benefits, I find that they mostly aim at several goals. 

Goal 1: Increase joy.

Solving work-life balance conflicts is not the point. The goal is to enjoy our lives more—whether that be at work or elsewhere. That requires us to think about what drives joy in all parts of our lives and proactively push them into our calendars. Our kids may make us feel content, but they may not deliver the hedonic happiness we crave from participating in our individual hobbies, hanging with our adult friends, and having the kinds of experiences we had before having kids. 

Goal 2: Increase the feeling of spaciousness.

We feel spacious when we decrease our mental load and create windows when we feel unburdened by responsibility. Having a free weekend is not good enough if we spend it worrying about everything we need to do.

Achieving this feeling requires tactical interventions, such as limiting the number of things we have going on at any one time, crafting our calendars to enable unbounded time periods, implementing systems that help us let go when we’re taking time off from our responsibilities, and preventing digital disruptions to that time off.

Goal 3: Increase the sense of control, agency, and freedom.

Much of work-life conflict occurs because we feel like passengers on a journey, with the needs of others driving the car. Accordingly, the tactics that will have the greatest impact are those that wrestle back control and power from others—in both a literal and emotional sense. 

Goal 4: Decrease the stress points.

The final reason work-life balance is not about time management in that time management techniques are typically oriented toward getting more done. However, the more we try to pack onto our plates, the heavier the coordination burden is, and the more likely we’ll feel stress when unexpected events occur. For this reason, we need systems that enable us to know what is happening, coordinate easily, and have buffers and response plans for the exceptions. 


Is Work-Life Balance Just for Rich People?

When discussing work-life balance, it’s worth stating that not everyone has an abundance of choices. They can’t simply switch jobs or have the financial resources to outsource parts of their childcare and household management to make their lives easier. 

However, many of us do have choices. We also have more choices than we think—that is when we allow ourselves to look outside of what we’re taught we “should” do, the lifestyle standard that “everyone else” has, and the activities our kids “have to“ do to be “successful.”

 

A Catalog of Tactics that Enable Optimizing Your Life & Balance


In this section, you’ll find tactics that real people use to create their version of an optimal work-life balance. This isn’t a list of things you should do but a collection of ideas you could try. They’re meant to serve as inspiration.

As you read the tactics, consider how you might experiment with each. You don’t need to commit to radical shifts immediately, but even bite-sized experiments can offer a glimpse into the possibilities of more substantial change. And that glimpse into the future can motivate you. The benchmark for these experiments should be ease and emotional connection. They should feel small enough to get started without needing extensive planning or permission from others but large or long enough that you will be able to experience the benefits emotionally. 

Finally, this is a living list. If you have seen or practiced other tactics to optimize work-life balance, please let me know!

Create Space for Your Joy

Goals: ↑ Joy

We sometimes feel a deeper tension between work and life when the activities that bring us joy and energy are absent from our lives. (Our kids are not a substitute for those activities!) 

 

Tactics & Examples

Create Pockets of Spacious Time Regularly

Goals: ↑ Spaciousness

If you don’t structure your time off, it never comes. It’s easy to end up with vacations that are more tiring than restorative and weekends filled with “have-tos” just like weekdays are. 

 

Tactics & Examples

Practice Good Sleep Hygiene

Goals: ↑ Joy, ↓ Stress

When we’re tired, everything is worse. As Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson write in It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work, “Sleep-deprived people aren’t just short on brains or creativity, they’re short on patience. Short on understanding. Short on tolerance. The smallest things become the biggest dramas. That hurts colleagues at work as much as it does the family at home. Being short on sleep turns the astute into assholes.”

It may not be easy to get our full allotment of sleep every night, but we can maximize whatever time we have.

 

Tactics & Examples

Optimize for Presence at Home

Goals: ↑ Joy, ↑ Spaciousness, ↓ Stress

With limited time in our evenings and weekends, it’s essential to be present at home, which means clearing work and administrivia from our minds during those windows.

 

Tactics & Examples

Manage Your Boundaries More Effectively

Goals: ↑ Joy, ↑ Spaciousness, ↑ Control, ↓ Stress

Once we clarify what’s most important to us, following through on that intention requires saying No to things that aren’t important. For many of us, that means facing our fears about the impact on our relationships. “We are worried about damaging the relationship, writes Greg McKeown in his book Essentialism. “But these emotions muddle our clarity. They distract us from the reality of the fact that either we can say no and regret it for a few minutes, or we can say yes and regret it for days, weeks, months, or even years.”

 

Tactics & Examples

Divide Household Responsibilities Clearly and Fairly

Goals: ↑ Control, ↓ Stress

While there are many approaches to dividing household responsibilities, the key terms are “clearly” and “fairly.” 

Clearly is…well, clear. To get everything done, it is helpful to assign roles. However, the more important benefits to role clarity are about your relationship with your partner. When you have clear roles and expectations, there are fewer opportunities for conflict and disappointing each other. Moreover, clear roles ease the burden because you need to spend less time coordinating—i.e., having a conversation about every task, every time.

Finally, “fairly” is a subjective concept. The best approach is one that works for the family and everyone believes is equitable, even if that means a split of household tasks that is not perfectly equitable in time and effort. 

 

Tactics & Examples

Make and Keep Family Expectations Clear

Goals: ↑ Control, ↓ Stress

To make a family system work, it is helpful to have a reliable “source of truth” that enables everyone to understand what is happening, negotiate priorities, and pre-solve issues. Creating that source of truth—typically through the calendar—reduces the burden on one person to keep everything in their head and answer everyone’s questions. Pairing good calendar strategies with clear conversations makes it easier to manage the family load.

 

Tactics & Examples

Proactively Create Buffers and Options to Handle Unexpected Events

Goals: ↑ Control, ↓ Stress

Things will go awry—we all know that. 

When our schedules are 100% full, we lack the resilience to respond to unexpected events. When those unexpected events arise, they cause a massive cascading effect. For example, instead of shifting around one meeting to respond, we have to shift around ten meetings, or when we look to reschedule a meeting, the next available slot is weeks away. 

Having buffers also helps us feel less stressed when things change. It’s like walking on a bridge rather than on a tightrope.

Finally, if we have responses A, B, and C to those unexpected events already built, we can handle these situations with less stress.

 

Tactics & Examples

Eliminate the BS Parts of Your Role

Goals: ↑ Joy, ↑ Spaciousness, ↑ Control

Even without making big changes, we can make our jobs more satisfying and enable space to make better balance choices by removing the fluff and remodeling to fit our needs. The first in that effort is to eliminate the parts of our jobs where additional effort yields no value. Those situations represent opportunities to reallocate your time and attention elsewhere. 

 

Tactics & Examples

Develop and Flex Your Power at Work

Goals: ↑ Control

Creating the balance we want means forcing our workplaces to bend to how we want to work. This is easiest when we provide unique value and when we feel powerful. 

 

Tactics & Examples

Adopt Financial Strategies that Support Freedom

Goals: ↑ Control, ↓ Stress

Conventional personal finance advice recommends a slow-and-steady approach to our finances. That’s good, but if it takes 30 years to pay off our mortgage and our finances grow just a bit at a time, we may never feel rich—or at least rich enough to have the courage to optimize our lives for joy and meaning rather than wealth creation.

 

Tactics & Examples

Schedule Evaluations of Your Work-Life Balance

Goals: ↑ Control, ↓ Stress

When we step back and examine how things are going, we can spot where we are out of balance more quickly and identify how we can rebalance accordingly. Making these reflections a scheduled routine helps us avoid getting sucked into the very vortex that pushes us out of balance.

 

Tactics & Examples

Do You Have Additional Ideas?

 

If you have seen or practiced other tactics to optimize work-life balance, please let me know!

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