Work/Life Balance: Making It REAL

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Does your manager preach “work/life balance” while slapping a 5 p.m. “quick sync” on your calendar?

Do you scarf protein bars between meetings and drag yourself home after seven too tired to walk your dog—because your workdays keep slipping out from under you?

If you say you want work/life balance, but don’t haveit, or work for a manager hellbent on wringing every last drop of productivity from you even though you’re running at 110%, you need more than wistful talk. You need guardrails—ones that remind you and your manager you’re a person, not a power strip.

Here’s how to reclaim your life and create work/life balance.

Retrain yourself.

Sure, your manager doesn’t make work/life balance easy. But ‘fess up, you don’t either. You tell yourself, “I’ll just knock out this one email,” and the next thing you know it’s eight p.m. Because you can work late or take work home, you let yourself waste time during your workday. You check your inbox during your kid’s soccer game “just in case.” You sulk silently in meetings that detour down rabbit trails, when you could say, “We’re off track,” and help wrap it up. You feel guilty for not replying to a weekend email even when it’s not marked urgent.

What if you cut a deal with yourself—to leverage your time today…and every workday this week in exchange for leaving work by five-thirty at the latest? You’ll have your evenings back—and won’t that be worth it?

Create Boundaries.

If late-night emails don’t bother you, great. But if you detest late night emails, stop replayingto them. Skim them if you must—but hold your replies until the morning. If you treat every 10 p.m. message like a house fire, you’re training others to expect a rescue.

And if you’re the one firing off emails at midnight, try a little restraint. Save them as drafts. Use the “send later” function. Your team doesn’t need a cortisol spike every time they check their phone after dinner. If you hit send at 12:47 a.m., you’re setting off alarm bells when your team’s trying to unplug. Your people deserve REM sleep, not stress spirals.

Allow Yourself To Be OFF On PTO

If your PTO includes “just checking in really quick,” let’s be honest—you’re not on vacation. You’re doing remote work in flip-flops, calling it rest while your brain stays on a leash. Protect your time off like you protect your passwords.

Set an out-of-office reply that throws elbows—politely, but firmly. For internal teams, try: “I’m on vacation. I’m not checking email. You’ve got this.” Short. Clear. No guilt.

For customers or clients, hand off a real point of contact. Include a name, phone number, and the confidence that your team can handle things without you playing lifeguard from a beach chair or manager-by-ghost.

Beware of Creeping Grey Zones

Do you take calls from treadmills and reply to Slack messages in grocery store parking lots. It’s time you repainted those lines between work and personal time in neon. And for the love of all things caffeinated, stop treating weekends like bonus workdays.

Do you want your evenings back—or long for weekends that feel like weekends? Do you crave work/life balance? You can create it.

And if all else fails? Shut your laptop and fantasize—just for a minute—about flinging it into the nearest river.

© 2025 Lynne Curry, PhD, SPHR, SHRM-SCP