Two Things You Can Do Right Now to Improve Your Work/Life Balance
This is a great guest blog from Spivey Consulting Group’s amazing COO Anna Hicks.
I’ve been fortunate enough to work from home for most of my career, but only in the last year and a half of the pandemic did that arrangement start to become difficult for my mental and emotional well-being. With everything being canceled from community theatre rehearsals to exercise classes to lunches with friends, I expected that all of that extra time I now had on my hands would lead to less stress. After all, as an introvert, greater downtime had always equated to greater relaxation for me.
Instead, I found the opposite to be the case. Without all of those extracurricular activities, my life went from dozens of moving parts, commitments, and engagements all working together in choreography, to instead my time being narrowed down to two basic states: (1) at home and working, or (2) at home and not working... but still thinking about work. Sitting on my couch watching TV with my husband at 8 PM, I would find my mind repeatedly wandering to an email I wasn’t sure how to respond to. Playing with my dog in the backyard, I would suddenly realize that she’d been standing in front of me with the ball at my feet while I thought about how to troubleshoot an issue one of our clients was having. Even when I wasn’t working, I was always working. It wasn’t difficult to see that this wasn’t ideal for me, but fixing it was another thing entirely.
So I started paying attention. I would catch myself in one of those moments, thinking about work even when I had intentionally tried to disconnect, and I would backtrack — how did I get here? Often, I found, it stemmed from my phone. Even though I may have picked up my phone for reasons having nothing to do with work (looking up reviews for a movie I was thinking about watching, for example), the moment I opened my screen I would be bombarded with emails and other notifications. And suddenly, half of me would be pondering whether 59% was too low a Rotten Tomatoes score to bother with Wonder Woman 1984, and the other half would be thinking about the fact that there were six more unread emails in my inbox than there were an hour ago when I decided to stop working for the night.
And for what? I wasn’t spending that time actually dealing with the emails or being productive; all I was doing was letting those thoughts and stresses invade my personal life and private time. And this inability to stop thinking about work wasn’t helping me to perform better at my job — in fact, it was hindering it. During this time period, I noticed myself making bad decisions and preventable mistakes more frequently than ever before in my academic or professional career. Not being able to genuinely take time off at the end of the night made it impossible for me to recharge and tackle work efficiently and productively the next day.
I realize how privileged I am to even be having these problems, with my steady job that doesn’t require me to interact with others in-person during a global pandemic. Certainly, greater work anxiety is a problem that pales in comparison to most of the life difficulties that have come about during COVID times. But it was something I genuinely struggled with on a daily basis, and something I think I’ve found some easy and effective ways to mitigate.
So, I wanted to share these two tips for separating life from work when both life and work sometimes require your phone. The first tip is a little more complicated technologically, but in my opinion, it’s well worth the effort. The second is incredibly simple but may require you to get over a bit of a mental block.
#1 — Corral your notifications with custom app icons
I have to admit, I never thought that one of the most effective work/life balance techniques in my arsenal would stem from a TikTok trend, but here I am! I actually learned about this TikTok-originated phenomenon through Facebook (which I know makes me sound old), but here are the basics: using iOS’ Shortcuts function, you can customize your iPhone app icons to display alternate images from the standard icons the apps come with. See my home screen below (featuring my sweetheart mutt Noodle):
Now, the purpose of this trend was purely aesthetic, and in fact, one of the reasons I believe it promptly died was that it came with a cost to functionality: badge notifications. When you use shortcuts, you don’t get the little red numbered notifications that show up at the corner of your normal app icons. I actually found this to be a huge upside to shortcuts, though. Now when I open my home screen, instead of being immediately hit with a bunch of bright red visual reminders that I have unread emails and items on my to-do list, instead I can just use the shortcuts to navigate to whatever I actually opened my phone for in the first place without a second thought. And, when I do feel ready to tackle those to-do list items, I have my original app icons (and thus my badge notifications) all in one place, on the last page of my home screen:
Here’s the benefit: when I open my phone to get things done or to work, all I have to do is scroll to that last page (the most minor of inconveniences), and everything is at my fingertips, just as easy as before. However, when I open my phone while I’m not trying to work — while I’m instead wanting to look up a movie review or send a friend a meme or Google the capital city of Estonia — I’m no longer immediately reminded of all of those emails and to-do list items.
When I first decided to make custom app icons for my phone, I did so because I thought it would look nice. I had no idea that it would make a major difference in combating work-related stress, but it has done exactly that.
While installing custom app icons on your phone isn’t difficult, it is a bit technical and does take some time. The first thing you’ll need to do is download images for each of the icons you want to replace. If you’re going for a certain color or aesthetic, you can buy huge sets of icons in a wide variety of styles on Etsy for under $5, or, if you only want to use this as a notifications workaround, you can just Google images for each of the icons you want to replace. You can follow the instructions here to do it yourself.
#2 — Take your work account off your Mail app
This one is less complicated technologically, but for me it required a far greater effort because there was simply a mental block. It was actually originally a suggestion from my therapist, and at the time I think I might have literally laughed in response. I work from my phone all the time, and a big part of that is responding to emails. I couldn’t just delete my work email from my phone. Or could I?
Here’s the thing: deleting your work account from whatever email app you use (for me it’s just iOS’ default mail app) doesn’t mean that you can’t check your work emails on your phone; it just makes it slightly more difficult. For me, that slight added difficulty makes all the difference. Now, when I want to read or respond to work emails on my phone, I have to go through my internet browser first. That may seem like a small extra step, but what that extra step accounts for is intentionality. I almost never end up looking at work emails anymore when I don’t actually have the time or mental energy to think about and address them properly. Instead of just drifting to work emails through muscle memory or wanting to check my personal emails, going to my work email requires me to think about what I’m doing and move forward deliberately. I can’t tell you the difference this has made.
To be transparent, most people in my life would probably still call me something of a workaholic. In fact, I’m writing this blog post — which no one is making me write and which has no deadline — at 7:45 PM while my husband cleans up after dinner. But, when I’m done with writing this, I will put down my laptop and be done with it. Really done. I will disconnect entirely from work, play with my dog, watch a movie, and spend genuine quality time with my loved ones. And though that is reward enough in and of itself, I will also get back to work tomorrow feeling all the more rejuvenated and ready to tackle my day.