Work-life balance. Discuss...

With many more people working from home over the last few months, I’ve been reading quite a few articles about the importance of maintaining a healthy work-life balance. But what is this in reality? The blurring of lines between work and home isn’t necessarily a bad thing in my opinion.

As a tutor, my working hours are a bit ‘all over the place’ anyway. Before lockdown, I would teach in the morning and again in the evening, with most of my afternoons free to do other things (including planning of course J) and I had a very good work-life balance for which I’m very grateful. I had actually stopped teaching in people’s homes prior to lockdown as I didn’t feel comfortable going from house to house and potentially spreading the virus despite washing my hands frequently.

I had been teaching online since September so was in a position to offer online tuition to my local students and some were happy to make the transition. So now I teach most days at varying times in the day. I don’t keep strict working hours so some weeks I’ll set a day or two aside to plan my lessons or work on my website and other weeks I’ll spread the work over the week. And sometimes I’ll work in the evenings if that suits me on that particular day. So yes I think I have a great work-life balance even if there lines are blurred by the very nature of working from home.

Perhaps I am one of the lucky ones as I’m self-employed and some people might feel very differently about working from home, but perhaps it’s time for companies to go back to the drawing board and forget the ‘9 to 5’ (why does Dolly Parton come to mind when I write that?). The few people I know who work from home say they are more productive working from home than at the office. Perhaps we just need to get used to this ‘brave new world.’