Six Top Tips for Striking the Optimal Work / Life Balance

Setting your own hours and high earning potential makes real estate an attractive career choice. Sadly though, it doesn’t take long for most agents to recognize the challenge of balancing work with life. To avoid becoming rundown and to maintain your physical, emotional and mental health, it’s crucial to learn how to create a healthy work-life balance.

Here are six top tips for a healthy work-life balance.

Time Block

An incredible productivity hack, time blocking includes segmenting your day into defined chunks of time – using tools like Google Calendar or iCal. Meant to help prioritize and focus the most important items on your to-do list, time-blocking additionally helps quash procrastination while eliminating distractions. Consider time-blocking personal time with friends and family, time to reviews emails, time to focus on prospecting and time to exercise. 

Prioritize

According to Asana – software for managing team projects and tasks – prioritizing ensures you’re hyper-focused while ensuring you complete your daily to-dos. To prioritize the most important thing you need to do, set daily goals and consider tackling the most challenging tasks first leaving a bit of room each day for unexpected tasks.

Exercise

The benefits of exercise are next to endless. From increased happiness, weight loss, increased energy, better sleep, and less stress, exercise should be a daily priority. If you’re feeling pressed for time, consider slowly incorporating exercise into your routine. Even a short walk in the morning, mid-day, or evening will help to establish an exercise routine.

Delegate

Most Realtors wear many hats – from a marketer, negotiator, manager, bookkeeper, tour guide, and administrator, the duties require an extensive skill set and loads of time. If you’re finding yourself overworked, it might be time to delegate, leaving your time left to connect with clients. Hiring others to help you – like a marketing person, a bookkeeper, or an unlicensed assistant – will free up your time, leaving you better rested and more focused. 

Unplug

While it’s helpful that smartphones provide us with handheld computers everywhere we go, it’s tough to ‘unplug’, with many of us nearly addicted to our devices. Contributing to FOMO and overall life dissatisfaction – it’s healthy to detach from our smartphones, even if only for a few hours each day. Meeting friends for lunch or coffee, consider leaving your phone in the office, or in your car. Heading to bed, leave the phone in the kitchen – far away from your night table. Watching a movie, turn the phone off.

Meditate

Meditation is proven to help in reducing stress and anxiety while increasing one’s attention span and their self-awareness. Not sure how you can get started? Not to worry – there’s an app for that. Rated the #1 app for Sleep, Meditation and Relaxation, with over 700,000 5-star reviews, Calm helps users through guided and ever-changing meditations. Similarly, the app, Headspace will teach you to meditate while helping you to live more mindfully.