Four Tips for Maintaining Perfect Work-Life Balance

Work-life balance is your own work-life fit that falls between two points: To adjust your work to fit in with you life, or to adjust your lifestyle to fit in with your work and career ambitions. When you recognize your own work-life fit, you will be able to pursue your career while remaining immune against both, getting burned out, or getting overwhelmed by your daily life and being unable to lead a successful career. This post includes four tips that will help you achieve work-life balance. And I’m going to take stay-at-home moms as an example.

Why stay-at-home-moms?

Not only because I’m a stay-at-home-mom, but also because the stay-at-home mom represents a perfect example how reaching work-life balance can be a real challenge. You’re swamped by a ton of overwhelming time-suck daily chores, you have to be constantly alert for the current needs of your family, and you have to be aware of their future needs as well. You also have a sizable amount of mental and emotional work to do.

Mentally: You want to improve your knowledge on the age-specific strategies to discipline your kids.

Emotionally: You want to be emotionally stable. That’s super important as you want to give your kids the emotional support they need as they’re growing up.

Immense amount of work, isn’t it? Yet, you still can establish a successful home-based career. And these are some tips that are going to help you.

Tip #1: Set your mind to work

Your working environment hugely affects how you pursue your work. Here is how to set up your perfect working environment.

• Set up your home office: You want to make a focus-enhancing ambiance amid the coziness of your home.
  • Equipment: Your home office needs to be somewhere away of your bedroom. You don’t necessarily need a fully-equipped office room. Sometimes a simple table and chair would suffice.
  • Noise level: Set you home office in a place where the surrounding sound level makes your concentration at best. Maybe you prefer complete quietness. Or you’re fully focused in a busy environment such as you living room.
  • Lighting: You want to provide the perfect lighting conditions. Natural lighting is ideal, of course if you prefer to work during daytime.
• Figure out the time of day when you’re most productive. Maybe you’re most focused during the morning, noon, or evening. It would be your best time to pursue working.

Tip #2: Start small

Building a robust reputation should be your first priority. Here is how to reap stellar feedback from your to-be clients, and subsequently, make a solidly built client base.

• Avoid getting overwhelmed by gigs: As you set off your career and you still don’t have the working experience, you would want to take more time than actually needed to complete your business tasks. So, take one gig at a time and make sure to set an agreeable deadline with your client that secures a somewhat easygoing working schedule.
• Adopt the go-getter attitude: Be open to client’s requests. This will open up new career areas ahead of you. Maybe you will discover new niches you haven’t even known you’re capable of embracing.

Tip #3: Save time

Prepare checklists and templates for things you do frequently in your work. Taking myself as an example, I come across a number of things every time I take a writing gig. So, I have these items already prepared:

• A checklist for recurrent interview questions: Among other things, I often need to ask my client how many words the article should be, and what keywords to include.
• A template of a professional cover letter so that I only need to change the job title and client’s name in the greeting.
• A template of text and page formatting: I have ready templates of Kindle ebook formatting and audio transcription texts where fonts, line spacing, indents, page margins, etc. are all set.

Tip #4: Let your business grow with experience

Avoid adding more load on yourself. You don’t have to exhaust your mind thinking how to improve and expand your business. Focus on providing high-quality work that will land you more clients. The more you deal with clients and cater to their needs the more your experience grows. This alone is capable of inspiring you with new ideas on how to expand your business and establish more career niches. In my case, as a bilingual, I intuitively started my freelancing career as a translator. But honestly, I always felt I’m not cut out for translation. But as I was growing my client base, I started getting requests from my clients to do audio transcription, ghostwriting, and blogging. That was the time when I discovered my authentic proclivity for writing. And I ended up having ideas and things that I want to share with people through setting up my own blog.

Bottomline, in terms of achievement and success, life and career have a direct relationship. If you want to establish a successful career, then you want to lead a successful life as well.

If you have some ideas, experiences, and/or success stories on how to achieve work-life balance, let’s know what you think. Share your experience with us in the comments section below to inspire people like you.