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Work-life balance in the New Normal

A sudden change in our work settings has taken us all—more or less—by surprise. With an increase in demands to perform just as well in the New Normal, we face the challenge of maintaining our mental and physical well-being. What ways can we use to improve our everyday work and life?

614 days. The number of days we have lived through since the beginning of the first lockdown in the Czech Republic – and our new way of life and work that it has brought along. A lot has been said about how we should maintain our „new“ work-life balance. But as Matt Haig posted on Twitter – we should not, first of all, forget that how we were working before Covid was not an excellent example of Work-Life Balance for the majority of us:

“Lockdown posed massive mental health challenges. But our ‘normal’ world of long working hours, stressful commutes, overstretched lives, hectic crowds, shopping centres, pointless meetings, eco-destruction and 24/7 everything was hardly a mental health utopia. A new normal please.“ /Matt Haig, 2021/

Seeing our life through the positive approach lens, Covid has offered a great possibility for the majority of us, to search for –  and find – our own, and possibly even better Work-Life balance system.

Discover our complex wellbeing solutions?

HERE ARE A FEW TIPS, THAT CURRENT STUDIES AND THE APPROACH OF OUR CLIENTS REVEAL AS THE MOST EFFECTIVE WAY IN CREATING IT:

TIP 1:

Focus on the solution, not the negative emotions: Using the positive psychology approach, as well as the rational approach helps us gain control over situations where we have lost it partially – like in the case of Covid times and our previously used Work-Life Balance approach.

TIP 2:

Use different daily schedules for in-office, remote, and hybrid regimen – never use the same one for all – be flexible and smart: The reason is very simple: because different situations challenge us with different needs and tasks.

TIP 3:

Keep yourself informed about new ways how to plan and rest. Recent research has shown that people who work in home office settings have a tendency to work more and be less likely to plan breaks. It has been shown that 5–10-minute breaks each 50–60 minutes are an effective way to ensure quick recovery of our focus and strength. These effects are not valid for 20-minute breaks after 2 hours of work. Longer breaks lasting around 30 minutes are recommended after 2–4 hours of work.

According to this study, the following activities are most effective for rest during work:

• Physical activity: increases the blood flow to brain regions involved in focus
• Meditation: disconnects from thoughts related to work and increases focus
• Learning something new, games: improves motivation and self-confidence
• Helping others: increases solidarity and positive emotions
• Setting new goal(s) and plans for the future: enables detachment from details and perceiving the bigger picture

TIP 4:

New ways of resting: Sleep & Productive Napping. Deep regeneration strengthens the ability to cope with everyday challenges, be mentally balanced, and to deliver results: the ability to keep focus, logical thinking, and other cognitive functions which we use during work tasks are regenerated.

Work-time napping: is a new approach, ideal to try out during home office.

How to do it:

• Establish rules for it in the office (with your superior and colleagues)
• Find a silent and calm place
• Do not nap more than 20 min + 10 minutes for relaxation
• Ideally according to biorhythm between 2–4 pm

TIP 5:

Work with Boundaries: not just in your relationships, but also within your physical environment and roles.

“Gates”: symbolic boundaries in the form of line or simply closing/opening the door help our brain switch from work to rest and vice versa.

TIP 6:

Use Productivity Tips:

Attention economy: Today our time is considered as an economic category (attention economy): advertisers pay for our views, our work pays for our time, we pay for someone’s time (e.g., a massage or fixing of a laptop).

Awareness of our own attention: Quite often we know which tasks we need to do but get distracted easily. We then think we are so busy and our days are just too short. In reality we are not being productive. What is lacking is the awareness of what we give our attention to.

What is then productivity? To be productive means that we know what needs to be done and do it in a realistic amount of time.

GOLDEN EXTRA TIP FOR PRODUCTIVITY IN NEW NORMAL: META-AWARENESS.

In the beginning we can be very unaware of how much we lose focus. It is good to take a 60-minute time-frame after which we have a timer and ask ourselves “what was I focused on in the past hour? Do I know? Did I focus on what I wanted or did my attention jump between various things and tasks?”

By becoming more aware (or mindful) about our focus, we can work on redirecting it to what matters. To help this, keep a distraction list: note down those things that draw your attention away.

TIP 7:

Rest Smart: Mindfulness & Meditation: Way of thinking where we are aware of the present moment. Changes brought on by mindfulness are directly observable and measurable even in magnetic resonance imaging (centres for positive emotion lights up). They can be regularly developed.

TIP 8:

Work With Your Personal Change Mindset: Many of us have a tendency to seek out conditions which for us are well-known and predictable. If these get taken away from us, let’s say with New Normal way of living, and the conditions of our everyday life change to make our life suddenly unknown and unpredictable, we have a tendency to react to remove the change.

How can we do it even better in New Normal and its new challenges?

• Mindset 1: the only certain thing is change. And we need to adapt to it.
  We can’t predict where will the future take us. We all can actively work to adapt – and in change management is the openness to the unavoidable changes and adaptation is the basic benefit of those who live their life successfully and with satisfaction.
  In case of covid this means to count on the possibility that a new covid state of emergency can happen again at any point in time. 
• Mindset 2: change makes us advance in our life.
  Without change we would not be there where we are now—it is good to remember this.
• Mindset 3: change can bring positive effects as well.
  Maybe you have already faced a situation where you had to go through an uncomfortable change and retroactively you have thought “why haven’t I done this earlier?”. 
  Covid has thought us a lot about ourselves and about new approaches to work. 

TIP 9: 

Keep Life Simple: Minimal is the New Normal. Do not spend too much time on overanalysing the situations. Learn fast from your mistakes. Long thinking about a situation, which is not oriented on the solution, takes away our energy more than it provides. 

Focus on the solutions and possibilities, which are available. Simplify wherever and whenever possible.

TIP 10:

Use Principles of Positive Psychology. The basic premise is that we each have in our hands the control over whether we will feel positive or negative feelings. Research has shown that we can actively change the state how we feel. To facilitate this, we can start feeling excited about the change instead of being afraid

„WHAT WOULD YOU DO WHEN YOU WOULDN’T FEEL AFRAID TO DO IT?“

Let us finish our tips and tricks with this sentence which can lead you further in your mentorship process, not just in creating your best Work-Life Balance system.

By PhDr. Iva Linda Maruščáková & Mgr. Lea Jakob