How to Incredibly Maintain a Healthy Work-Life Balance as a Freelancer

Whether you work from home, or you have a 9-5 job, we all face the same challenge; how to take care of a healthy work-life balance. Do you feel like you’re spending so much time on work, and you have no family time, or you’re so much stressed with housework that you slack on the job?

Well, you’re not alone! We all face this challenge on a daily basis, and we wonder how to balance out our lives. It’s hard, and I also face the same challenge.

But luckily there are steps that we can take to get things right on the track. I have found the following ways to be effective in creating a healthy work-life balance as a freelancer, and they’ve helped me a lot. You have even possible have heard some of them, but we sometimes need a nudge to get back on track

Below are great tips that can help you achieve a healthy work-life balance.

1. Have a routine and stick with it

Routine is extremely necessary, and beginning your day in an identical manner every day goes a long way. This might involve; rising up at a designated time, having your breakfast, reading your mail, catching up with your favorite journal. Whatever feels smart to you and eases you into the day. One among the foremost necessary steps therein routine is getting dressed.

2. Set work hours and focus

This may fluctuate day to day, however, the necessary factor is to stick to a schedule and achieve the maximum you can. It’s straightforward to merely keep working because of convenient — don’t do this. Unless you’re on a point in time, and you have to work late, begin and finish your workday on the set hours. It would even be nice to begin your day at 7:00 AM and end it at 5:00 PM and stay focused on your work.

3. Take breaks throughout the day

This applies to everybody within the force nowadays. We have a tendency to tend to stay committed to what we do or do throughout the day, and we fully forget we require breaks. Taking fast breaks throughout the day permits your mind to reset. Breaks are a good time to assume through a haul if you’re stuck, or get your ideas flowing if you experience a mental block.

4. Create a Working Space

If you work from home, you will probably notice that you like to move around with your laptop as you try to look for a comfortable spot to work, and this becomes hectic because of distractions. Well, you can designate one area as your working space/office, this can be in your bedroom or sitting room, and then make it yours. You can set up your desk, a comfortable office chair, computer, and office supplies.

You can decorate your office with your family photos, motivational quotes and also some desk flowers to keep your home office lively and organized.

5. Turn off When your Day Ends

Many freelancers don’t turn off at the end of the day, and you’ll find that we like to overwork ourselves until midnight or even past midnight, by this you get serious burnout, and you have no energy to wake up the following day to work.

Remember how we talked about setting working hours on point #2? Well, it’s also important to know when to call it off at the end of the day. If your day ends at 5:00 PM, you should be able to log off your computer, turn it off and wind down your work day and leave your work until tomorrow. By this, you should be able to turn your brain from work mode to home mode.

6. Minimize Distractions

When you’re working from home you’ll notice that you will get distracted very fast by dirty dishes, laundry pilling/dusty carpet, TV and radio, social media, the list is endless. It’s very hard to focus on work when working from home because you see a lot of stuff around you, and it’s another story, distraction is real.

My suggestion would be your work from the designated work-space, that we had discussed earlier on point #4. Keep your work-space from distractions as much as possible, if you want to get settled at once, you can take care of those distractions before you start working or set some time during the day to handle them.

Maybe do the dishes in your ten-minute break, or do the laundry during your lunchtime break. Just schedule it into your day like you would do with a meeting, and it will feel less like a house chore and more like another work-related task that needed to be done.

Social media: We get distracted very fast by social media platforms, and we’re tempted to continue chatting with friends, and we may forget about work. This is a serious distraction, but don’t worry, you can manage the situation by;

  • Deleting unnecessary Apps on your phone.
  • Turning off the Internet.
  • Scheduling your posts with SocialPilot which can post them for you later automatically.
  • Limiting the time you spend on certain websites.

7. Set Boundaries With Family, Friends, and Neighbors

Have you noticed that because you work from home, most of your family, friends and neighbors think that you’re always free to chat, or they can drop at your house any time? Well, it’s a huge misconception.

You have a real job like anyone else in a normal office, remember you’ve set your work hours and by all means, you need to stick to those hours. You’re not available to impromptu visits just because your office happens to be in your house. Not only that, but you don’t need to put a padlock while still inside your house in order to put off distractions you can’t be a prisoner in your own house — just set boundaries.

It’s important to have your family, neighbors, and friends on board with your expectations from the beginning, and the best way to do it is by communication, but do it politely. Let them know you work from home, and you have a schedule and deadlines to meet. It doesn’t mean that you can’t help someone out, but let them also communicate it to you in advance.

Lastly,

8. Take Good Care of Yourself.

Our health is our greatest wealth and when you’re working from home you should make it a point of taking good care of yourself.  Remember we had talked about taking breaks throughout the day on point #3? Now let’s elaborate that on taking good care of yourself — mind, soul, and body.

  • Take plenty of water and eat healthy foods.

You can buy a water bottle and fill it with water that you need to take during the day and keep in on your workstation to make sure that you’re taking enough water as you work during the day to stay hydrated. Water does wonders for positive moods and improves concentration.

Also, don’t forget to eat. Sometimes you will find that we get so engaged with our work that we forget that we’re supposed to eat, and we only find ourselves taking snacks which are not good for our health. It’s good to set time aside to prepare a healthy meal.

  • Make sure you’re taking care of your inner self, when working from home you can take a break for meditation, yoga, prayers or deep breathing.
  • Exercises. Trying doing some workouts before you start working, if you don’t have a workout you can try simple stretching exercises, you can stretch your neck, roll your shoulders, sit-ups, shake your legs and arms — any exercise is better than no exercise at all.

Conclusion

Even though getting equilibrium on work-life balance is not an easy task, it’s also critical to your success as a freelancer. This list might not be a comprehensive one, but at least it’s a great start for those looking for ways to balance work-life and still maintain harmony in their lives.

You can add more on the comments’ section so that I can also learn from you.

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