Author: Andreas Thumfart

Especially during the current situation with a lot of remote work from home, it is important to save the work life balance of your employees and of course yourself.

1. Stop emailing outside of office hours

Even if you like to work in the evening, the early morning or during your weekend, you might have colleagues or employees who don’t or who just need some energy regeneration for the next day or week. That’s why you should not send them emails outside of office hours.

Most people also tend to “finish” their work before leaving the office for the evening or the weekend and are shuttind down their “work brains” to get some rest. If they receive an email during that time, even if they don’t read it right away, they at least think about it, what costs them energy. They might even feel the need to answer your email as soon as possible, what makes them work instead of getting some rest.

If you have to click the “send” button, use the email scheduling function of outlook to send it automatically at a scheduled time.

That directly brings me to the next point:

2. Keep people from working during the weekends

There will be exceptions of course. There are deadlines to meet and sometimes it’s necessary to do some work during the weekend, but that shouldn’t be more than a couple of times per year.

Your employees should be able to finish their work in friday, so they can start the weekend without worrying about anything. And they shouldn’t receive any emails after leaving the office as those could directly tear them back into their work-life. I can’t imagine many work related things that can’t wait until monday morning. Usually no lifes depend on what your business does.

3. Keep people from working during their vacations

Even worse than working during the weekends is working during vacation. Vacation should be used the regenerate personal energy and you as a manager should take care that your employees take their vacation and especially don’t work during it.

Last but not least:

Everybody is a little different. Some people just like to do some work during the weekend, like small preparations for the start of the week. So instead of sending out rules and punishing people who don’t follow them, talk to the employees about the rules and recommendations.

If you are working on multiple projects for multiple clients at the same time as I do, you might also think that recording your working hours for each project you are working on is one of these things that cost way too much time.

Especially since I have to record my working time in a not so modern and pretty user unfriendly ERP system, I don’t “enjoy” – that’s not the right word, nobody enjoys that – recording my working time in it. So I usually enter my working time into the system at the end of the week. But that brings up a new problem: I have to note down what I have done, otherwise I won’t know the exact times later.

Since a few months I’m now using toggle.com for my time recording. It not only provides a userfriendly web interface and smartphone apps. It also provides a Windows Desktop App with a mini-timer.

The mini timer is a smapp widget which shows a start/stop button and the currently selected project, the title of the entry and the time since starting with it.

Keeping that timer on top of the desktop doesn’t cost much space and helps enormously to not forget to switch the project when answering a call or a newly received email message.

The desktop app shows the same as the mini timer and additionally all tracked tasks in chronological order. For each task, it shows the title, the project (with selected color codes) and the time. It also groups entries which belong to the same task and gives you the option to work on the same task again by justing pressing the “play” button next to the entry.

If you don’t need high amounts of reports, team collaboration and invoicing, the free version of the app might be sufficient for you as well.

If you want to try it yourself:  https://www.toggl.com