One way to ensure that you can rest easy outside of work is to take care of your company’s insurance. Being a company director, you have to deal with the stress of being legally responsible for running your business not just for your employees’ sake, but for your homelife, too. That sense of responsibility can weigh heavy, and it’s vital that you look into protective measures like directors life insurance, which will go a long way to stopping you from catastrophising over your family’s future when insomnia hits.
But, even with the right protective measures and safeguards in place, you are likely working well beyond the national average of 32 hours per week.
You might have wondered about your own working hours, and how much is “too much”. Maura Thomas, a time management professional, has written that a “variety of studies show that working more than 45 hours per week is detrimental to both physical and mental health”, and that “productivity per hour declines around 50 hours per week, and working more than 55 hours is pointless.”
With that in mind, here are three ways business directors can help improve their work-life balance.
Get creative
If may be difficult to step away from the desk, but doing so can reap benefits that can actually help once you get back to work.
By experiencing new things, watching movies, enjoying conversation, books, television, and travelling, you’ll be building new neural pathways, which is a recognised way of increasing creativity.
Harvard Business School have highlighted several ways in which creativity can help business. It encourages innovation, increases productivity (allowing you to work smarter, not harder), allows for adaptability (to help deal with changing business landscapes, such as increased remote working), and it’s necessary for your business to grow – without creativity, businesses stagnate.
Unglue yourself from your phone
Though it may be unlikely that every country passes such laws, in France workers have a legal right to “disconnect” from their jobs outside working hours. This means that there’s no duty to check their work emails, be constantly glued to their phones when they want to be relaxing, sharing mealtimes with their families, or focusing on hobbies.
While you may want to have a quick check on your phone, consider whether doing so will actually aid productivity, or merely add to your stress.
Monica Bullington, a self-described burnout consultant, has written that “Constantly receiving work alerts, even during personal time, can make it difficult to fully disengage from work and disrupt your work-life balance.”
You may feel powerless against those email, text and call notifications, but consider using your phone’s ‘do not disturb’ feature, or setting timers on the relevant apps.
Using ‘do not disturb’, you can help yourself fully switch off at, say, 7pm, and get back to work in the morning.
Enjoy a hobby
Maybe you don’t want to stop working because you’ve got nothing more enjoyable in the calendar!
In this case, consider taking up a new hobby. You might consider something that fills a gap found in your work life: perhaps you’re at your desk all day, and so would enjoy a sport or dance full of movement and flexibility. Maybe you’re working with data and analytics, and can pivot to something creative such as painting or photography.
