How to improve work-life balance as a professional creative

Work-life balance has traditionally been one of the hardest things for professionals to master. Whether it’s the long hours, constant need for marketing, or the demands of networking, work tends to creep into the professional creative’s personal life quite easily.

Conversely, activities like spending time with your family and friends or going on vacation can just as easily eat into one’s work commitments.

A good work-life balance can preserve your sanity when you’re facing the stress of meeting deadlines for a variety of clients. In fact, studies show that work-life balance, rather than overwork, is an important practice to achieve career success.

However, the lines between work and personal life can get blurry. That begs the question, how can you get a handle on a healthy work-life balance as a professional creative?

You can’t work so hard that you’re burning out and not having time for friends and family, yet you understandably want and need to strive to achieve success for your professional projects.

Let’s go through the finer points of getting a healthy work-life balance right.

What is work-life balance?

So, what is what is work-life balance? We’ve all heard this term thrown around so much. However, that doesn’t diminish its importance.

It’s the ideal goal of every professional creative who opens and runs their own agency, brand, or studio: spending enough time at work to be a success in the industry, but also having enough time to be with friends and family, pursue a relaxing hobby, or enjoy any activity that you’re enthusiastic about.

Cambridge Dictionary offers a very clear work-life balance definition​:

“The amount of time you spend doing your job compared with the amount of time you spend with your family and doing things you enjoy.”

While this is a practical work-life balance definition, the actual work-life balance meaning​ and distribution can be different for every person.

Is it exactly a 50/50 split between career and lifestyle choices? Is it so you don’t get stressed out managing your creative business? Is it so you can go on vacation when you want to?

To some degree, a good work-life balance is a deeply personal and highly individualized system, but there are some basic principles we should be able to agree on.

For example, work-life balance strategies​​ include:

• not working so hard you end up hating your career
• taking care of your personal health and wellbeing
• making enough time for the activities in life that you truly enjoy
• spending enough time with the people who are important to you
• achieving what you want to accomplish professionally, without overdoing it

With these work-life balance examples in mind, let’s look at how to improve your own.

5 tips for maintaining work-life balance​

Here are a handful of powerful work-life balance tips that can help you out. They work well if you develop them daily and commit to them long term.

1. Set boundaries appropriately

Setting boundaries means that you have limits with regard to your work. At certain times and days, you simply won’t do any work because you’ve set that aside specifically for personal-life interests. Setting boundaries is an attractive concept, but it can be easier said than done for those creatives who turned their hobby into a career.

With that in mind, here are some work-life balance strategies for setting boundaries to keep work separate from your personal time:

• Don’t do any work-related tasks after a certain time in the day.
• Don’t take any job-related messages or emails on your smartphone (since your smartphone is going to be with you all the time).
• Take official “break times” during the day to allow yourself time to decompress and recharge during your workday.
• Use the entire weekend to do personal-life activities, whether that’s family time, meditation, or catching up with your favorite hobby.

The principle is that, while you certainly love being a professional creative and becoming bigger and better in your industry, you respect the fact that you can’t pursue this ambitious goal non-stop, which is where boundaries have to come into the picture to allow for a healthy work-life balance. Otherwise, you risk burning out.

For more ideas on how to successfully establish separation between work and personal life, see our two guides on setting boundaries and taking the right mental breaks:

• 

  Setting Boundaries: The Key to Maintaining Control of Your Life

  

  Annie Mueller

  24 Jan 2021

• 

  How to Reboot Your Brain and Mentally Reset Now

  

  Laura Spencer

  20 Aug 2023

2. Become super-productive

Productivity is always on the minds of professionals who understand that it empowers them to accomplish more in less time. 

Being productive is the key to achieving a stellar work-life balance, as getting more done on the job means you’ll have more free time, yet many don’t understand the basics of productivity to make it work for them.

Since productivity can be such an open-ended concept, it’s useful for us here to break it down into easily digestible components, which you can build into your own productivity system. To increase your productivity levels both on the job and at home, think of productivity as being the following:

• Organization. When you’re well-organized, you won’t need to waste time looking for the things you need to excel at your job. I don’t just mean being able to quickly locate physical items such as your tablet but also efficiently sorting mental items, like ideas and tasks you have to do both at work and in your personal life. For taking notes, try apps such as Evernote, and for tasks, there’s Todoist. 
• Theming. When you theme your days, weeks, and months, you automatically take the work of thinking about what to do for that given period of time out of the equation. This leaves you with extra time, as you can immediately get down to the tasks you need to do at work. For instance, Monday can be self-promotion day, Tuesday can be networking day, and so on.
• Time management. Knowing how to manage your time efficiently and schedule your workday and personal time accordingly will give you lots of breathing room. It helps to block off parts of your day for only specific tasks, so you know exactly what you’ll have to do at any given time, without having to waste time thinking about it. Timeboxing strategies like the Pomodoro technique will help you make the most of your time.

See our guides on productivity for more work-life balance tips, including time-tracking apps, getting a grip on busy work, and a guide to personal-habit productivity.

• 

  18 Best Time Tracking Software Apps to Boost Your Productivity

  

  Daniel Strongin

  25 Jul 2023

• 

  How to Reduce Busy Work as a Small Business Owner

  

  Laura Spencer

  10 Jul 2023

• 

  4 Important Personal Habits for a More Productive Life

  

  Annie Mueller

  09 Jul 2023

3. Delegate

You can’t do everything, even though that often feels like your only option as a professional in a creative industry. Delegation is the perfect way to lessen the tasks on your plate while still advancing all of those projects. 

Whenever you delegate, be clear about what the job expectations are and how you want them to be fulfilled. If you’re the only person working on a project, brand, or studio, there are tactics to automate your tasks, so you’re not doing everything yourself.

There’s always going to be a bit of pain, at first, when you’re training someone else on how to do certain tasks to free you up for more important responsibilities at work or free time at home. This front-end work will eventually pay huge dividends.

For example, when you hire someone, they don’t know how to use your ordering system. It’s going to take a while to teach them how to be proficient in this area. This may mean longer hours for you initially, but once they’re proficient, they don’t need your guidance anymore.

They now take a routine task off your hands, freeing you up for more personal time with your friends and family. That’s the power of knowing how to delegate. 

Delegating is one of the work-life balance tips​ that can make a big difference. See our tutorial on deciding how to do it:

• 

  How to Decide What to Delegate & Improve Your Productivity

  

  Andrew Blackman

  01 Sep 2021

4. Learn to prioritize

Being able to honestly and intelligently determine what tasks demand your immediate attention (needs) versus others that are only desires (wants) will empower you to get the crucial ones done, so you don’t feel so overwhelmed.

This is one of the ingenious work-life balance strategies​​ that’ll help you get the most important things done, and it also helps in identifying what’s truly key and what’s not.

When you can prioritize work tasks in this manner, you’re able to better decide what you can either postpone to a later date or nix altogether, so that you have more time for your personal life.

The trick with prioritization is that it also takes a bit of extra time and work up front—but you’ll be happy you invested it when you reap the benefits of more time to do the things you want later on down the line.

The more you get into the habit of evaluating your tasks like this, the sooner you’ll be able to decide what you want to accomplish because all the must-dos have been completed. This allows you to use your extra wiggle room for self-improvement or spending time with your loved ones.

For inspiration on prioritization, begin by seeing our tutorial on prioritizing tasks with GTD and how to better handle your emails:

• 

  How to Use the Getting Things Done (GTD) Productivity System

  

  David Masters

  13 Aug 2021

• 

  How to Prioritize the Emails You Respond To

  

  David Masters

  16 Oct 2020

5. Minimize distractions

During your working hours, anything that doesn’t contribute to you getting your tasks done more efficiently is a distraction. If it gets in the way of doing your job properly, then it’s a distraction.

The dilemma is that distractions abound more than ever in our digital world. Here are some of the worst distractions that you’re likely already being plagued by:

• text messages
• emails
• social media
• notifications
• phone calls

Yes, the above can occasionally be relevant to your workday if they’re specifically related to your job. For instance, if you’re about to fall behind on a deadline delivery for a client project, it would definitely be necessary to email your client to let them know in advance. As for social media, if you’re using it to promote your services and only use it for marketing during your workday, then that’s justifiable too.

I’m talking about the problem uses of the above, such as texting your friends or family during work, constantly checking emails while at work, using social media to while away the time on the job, failing to turn your smartphone notifications off, and taking inappropriate calls during the workday.

Follow these tips for cutting down on distractions and maintaining work-life balance:

• Only check your phone during breaks or lunchtime.
• Commit yourself to only checking emails once or twice during the workday.
• Strictly use social media for work-related reasons such as Instagram post boosting.  

See how to stop multitasking and focus on one thing at a time:

• 

  How to Do One Thing at a Time—and Stop Multitasking

  

  Andrew Blackman

  26 Aug 2023

What does work-life balance look like for creatives?

Achieving work-life balance is possible even for professional creatives who often work remotely and independently.

In a recent article, artist and filmmaker Charles Yeager talks about the landscape of remote work in a creative workspace. He brings up how balancing work and life can be easier when you work from home.

“Two of my remote-working friends with kids find it much easier to manage family activities this way.”

On the other hand, Yeager addresses the challenge that remote work poses for professional creatives:

“The temptation to work beyond regular hours can lead to burnout if boundaries are not managed. This can create the feeling that you’re always at work. Creatives may struggle to find a balance that allows them to maintain their creativity without overworking.” 

To avoid these challenges from getting in your way, he shares useful work-life balance tips such as sticking to a routine, having a dedicated workspace, setting clear boundaries, and prioritizing self-care.

“I would say that nearly 50% of my creative ideas or inspiration come to me when I’m outside in nature or exercising. Take time for hobbies, social activities, and relaxation.”

No matter what industry you work in, the rules are the same: draw the line, be firm with your priorities and separate spaces for each activity. 

Your professional career and your creativity will benefit from a fulfilling personal life, and the other way around.

Getting work-life balance right

The biggest takeaway is that you have to really commit to make this balance work for you. That’s why it’s so important to make definitive decisions, such as not replying or dealing with any work-related issues after a certain time each day, or on certain days.

When you set these rules for your way of approaching things and stick to them, that’s when you can strike a healthy balance between your professional and personal pursuits. You’ll not only be more successful, but also take care of yourself and spend time doing what you love.

Envato offers a myriad of creative assets and resources that’ll save you time and help you achieve your professional creative endeavors without compromising your time for yourself.

Keep in mind, it can take quite a bit of experimenting and trying out different methods until you arrive at the productivity system that works for you. But getting there is worth it for every aspect of your life, including your mental health.