11 Ways to Achieve Real Work-Life Integration

Achieving work-life balance is never easy. Sometimes you might find yourself struggling to figure out the best way to focus on conflicting priorities. You might end up with an unfair distribution of your effort between your personal life and work.

Spending more time to improve your personal life affects your professional performance negatively. Additionally, wasting opportunities to develop family and social relationships to focus on work and not allocating time to practice hobbies and relieve stress might cause a lot of losses.

However, the best solution is to stop thinking about trying to balance the various demands of your daily life on the personal and professional levels and instead integrate between both of them.

How can someone achieve work-life balance?

To find out what that really means and how you can do it, we asked Young Entrepreneurs Council members how someone can achieve work-life integration rather than balancing between them. Here's what they had to say:

1. Combine responsibilities

Achieving integration between work and life is another way of balancing them. Instead of separating professional life from personal life, the secret of integration lies in finding ways to combine the two.

For example, doing some work from home, allocating some time to work remotely, and finding ways to effectively deal with daily personal tasks while working will make it easier for you and save you some time.It is all about combining responsibilities seamlessly for a day that suits your needs.

Ryan D Matzner, co-founder of Fueled.

2. Set a schedule

It is important to write down daily achievements so that employees realize how each hour of the day has passed in order to know the possibility of achieving the right integration between work and life.

By tracking what you do, you will be able to make future changes to properly integrate work tasks with other life tasks, and you will not consider the blogging process a boring routine but a way to adjust things and return them to their balanced course.

Jared Atchison, developer, consultant, and co-founder of WPForms.

3. Work with purpose

Trying to balance work and personal life means that they are two completely separate entities, but the connection and overlap of our lives’ aspects, due to technology, has made it difficult to separate them. Integration between work and life can be achieved by keeping the goal in mind while doing any work.

If you consider attaining a happy and fulfilling life during your work, make sure that your steps serve your goal and support you in reaching it in all aspects. So, invest your work time to reach a goal that serves your professional and personal lives, and do not just work to pass the time.

Stephen Beach, co-founder and CEO of Craft Impact Marketing.

4. Do not separate work from life

The idea of ​​separating work from life is actually very old. This concept might make sense if everyone followed the conventional 9-to-5 schedule, but the digital age blurred the lines between work and personal life.

Everyone carries their devices, works at home, or deals with personal issues at work. Therefore, the best strategy is to be flexible and accept that work overlaps with your personal life, and vice versa.

Kalin Kassabov, founder and CEO of ProTexting

5. Work quickly and intermittently

Try to break up your workday by working at brief intervals and taking breaks. For example, set a goal to work on and finish in 30-45 minutes. After completing this task, take a short break to do something fun, like going out for a short walk or going out with your partner and relaxing, then come back to work with high energy. Then repeat that.

Blair Williams, software developer and founder of MemberPress.

6. Love what you do

If you want to achieve work-life integration, you have to love what you do. What will enable you to enjoy and achieve integration in everything you do is having this passion and love towards every working moment, having this clarity of your purpose on both sides, and waking up in the morning knowing you are doing what you love.

Nicole Munoz, CEO of Start Ranking Now.

7. Take advantage of your phone

Personally, I don't like being confined to my office all the time, but I like that I can get my work done anywhere and anytime. I can achieve this efficiently and effectively using my mobile phone and its applications.

Ben Walker, Founder and CEO of Transcription Outsourcing, LLC.

8. Find an ideal work environment

Some people might succeed in a basic office environment with a team, while others find comfort in independent work. So, not everyone works the same way. To determine the ideal work environment for you, it would be useful to ask yourself: “Does working from home help you focus more? What about working while traveling?” When you find adequate answers for your ideal work environment, keep them in mind because they will control your productivity. People do better when they are happy and comfortable.

Andy Karuza, founder and CEO of FenSens.

9. Focus on productivity, not time

The importance of time increases as productivity does. What is important is how much you accomplish, not how many hours you spend at work. This principle can be applied to personal life, as spending time with family and friends is not important if it does not benefit everyone.

Duran Inci, co-founder of Optimum7.

10. Change your expectations

Some people expect everything to be perfect. They expect to finish all their work on time and to have plenty of time for their hobbies and some projects to satisfy their passion. However, if you want to achieve work-life integration, you have to set realistic expectations. Be prepared for the days when you will need to put in extra time at work and then make up for it later, for example.

Stephanie Wells, founder of Formidable Forms.

11. Change the way you think

The idea of ​​work-life integration is just a mind game. You have to start it to avoid feeling stressed or exhausted from excessive work. True work-life integration requires deliberate practice, a shift in perspective, changing your mindset, and understanding that work is an essential component of life and should not be underestimated.

Chris Christoff, lead developer at MonsterInsights.