Over 80% of people are unsatisfied with their work-life balance. Are you one of them? If so, it’s time to make a change. Start with the following tips to take advantage of technology options and start to improve your work-life balance.
Use Technology to Make Tasks Quicker and Easier
Use technology to your advantage to cut down on the time you spend on certain tasks. Here are some ideas:
- Cut down on unnecessary emails and phone calls by using a collaboration tool with your family or coworkers. For example, try sharing notes on Evernote, or share documents using Google Drive.
- Utilize online services like Task Rabbit to outsource certain tasks like doing laundry and grocery shopping.
- Spend less time balancing your finances by using easy budget tools. Some tools allow you to automatically track your spending in their app through a pre-paid Mastercard.
- Make it easy to access any documents by storing them on the cloud, such as through DropBox.
Keep Your Life Organized Through Productivity Apps
We’ve all used apps to help us with one task or another, but productivity apps may be the key to balancing life and work. Organize to-do lists, set reminders, and keep on-task based on your schedule.
Trello is a popular tool that allows you to outline tasks and organize them into different “boards” and “cards.” You can also set due dates and collaborate with other people.
Other productivity apps include:
- Wunderlist
- OmniFocus
- Any.do
Make no mistake. These productivity apps aren’t just for work. Use them to organize all aspects of your life, and you’ll see your work-life balance begin to equalize.
Use Workplace Healthcare Portals
Stress is known to cause emotional, physical, and behavioral issues. Stress can also work the other way around: if you’re experiencing physical and emotional issues, you’ll become more stressed. That’s why taking care of your health — both physical and mental — can aid in a positive work-life balance.
The problem is that many workers focus so much time on their work that, at the end of the day, they don’t have the energy to focus on their personal health. Workplace healthcare portals change that. These programs can help:
- Keep your wellness information together in one place.
- Deliver reports and messages.
- Personalize your records and track your health behaviors.
- Encourage participation in wellness programs.
- Assess health risks.
Programs like this make it easier and less time-consuming to invest in your health. By using technologies like this, you can become healthier and reduce the stress in your life for better work-life balance. Using your workplace health portal to its full abilities is a great strategy for dealing with stress.
Streamline Your Media Consumption
You’d be surprised at how often you spend consuming media, whether it’s online news, social media posts, or television. Most people spend around 490 minutes — that’s over eight hours per day —consuming media. In that regard, technology can almost be a curse when it comes to your work-life balance, but it doesn’t have to be.
The blessing comes in allowing you to leverage technology to streamline your media usage. SquareAll, for instance, is an app that puts all your social media accounts into one place. Cold Turkey is another program that lets you lock yourself out of social media sites for certain parts of the day so you can get more done while saving your social media browsing for your downtime.
Other options like Feedly allow you to subscribe to only your favorite websites to make scanning the news and staying up-to-date on your sites’ latest blog posts easy. It saves you time surfing the Internet for the most up-to-date news.
Manage your work-life balance
The possibilities are simply endless. If you’re looking for better work-life balance, start by exploring ways technology can use productivity to turn that into a possibility.
