How would you define work/life balance, and if you are working remotely, how do you maintain a boundary between work and your own time?

when you can devote enough time for family or recreation you have WLB.

I don't. I'm here in the office on sunday, and its not my choice. would love to be home to cuddle my wife and 2 babies, but what can I do?

Work-life balance means different things to different people. For example, I’m single (divorced) with no kids, so for me, work is the most important thing in my life right now. I guess I live to work, rather than work to live. But I make time for hobbies and meeting friends for dinner and so on. I love my job and am happy to even work on weekends, if necessary.

I can see how for people with families, it is different. If you have young children, it’s natural to want to spend more time with them. But once the kids are teenagers, they’d rather hang out with their friends anyway, so you may not be seeing them as much anymore. And if you have adult kids who are living away from you, that just leaves you and your spouse, so again, the work-life equation is different.

I think the coronavirus has readjusted the work-life balance for some people (those with young children) in a good way, but for others (like myself), it hasn’t changed anything at all. I’ve known some who haven’t been able to adjust and their relationship with their families has become strained. Specifically, one family I know was having great difficulties because both parents were forced to telework and their kids had to have online lessons. There weren’t enough rooms or computers in their apartment for everyone to have their space and be able to concentrate. The guy ended up spending most of the day with his laptop in a nearby café.

Start by calling it LifeWorkBalance for starters.

Life, on balance, should be work x 2. Even if you absolutely adore your work, having even more fun outside work gives a multiplier effect to your whole self.

We are human beings after all, not human doings.

I tend to completely forget about work when I am done for the day. I ignore those emails that drop into my inbox on my phone late at night. They can wait.

My boundary between work and life is absolute. Once I finish the required legal working hours for the day, I log out from my work and block my coworkers from my phone and social media until I get back to the grind. The posters above me have said all that I wanted to say, but I'll add that my problem about working from home is that my employer seems to have the impression that they can work their employees for longer since they have nothing else to do since they're stuck at home, which is so not true.

When my work hours are done, all notices and correspondence from work are turned off and ignored. Balance.

I am not the owner nor principle partner so when quiting time comes I too end all communication with my job. What happens after hours is not my responsibilty.

Same with clients.

Being a workaholic is not something to be proud of. That is NOT life/work balance.

I do lots of different jobs so as not to be beholdened to any single boss-works great!

For me is the point where you can get the most of both things. And it takes a lot of planning and organization to be able to separate them while teleworking.

In that aspect it is much harder than the usual system. A trip on the train marks the limit very easily.

Instead of actively trading time for money, set up systems and businesses than generate money passively while you sleep or do something else. That way you have a life:work ratio closer to 10:1 or even 100:1, instead of 1:2. That, for me, is proper balance. If you're spending most of your life working just to keep on living, are you even living?

But that's the problem with formal education and society in general, people are taught from a very young age that the only thing you can do is go to school, get good grades, go to college, then get a job and wage slave for the rest of your life for peanuts and hope for a promotion once in a decade. When you tell people they should look into running a business, they think you need massive amounts of initial investment, or rich parents, or "luck" to do it and it's not for the average Joe, which can't be further from the truth. There are plenty of business models you can start and run with very little (or literally zero) money.

As long as you give away control of your time and income to someone else, your time is used and your income artificially limited by someone else.

Toshiro and Speed

What happens if there is an emergency at work and they need to contact you after hours? It could be a death of a colleague, someone you work with might have become seriously ill or had an accident, or there was a fire at your workplace or anything. Are you just going to make sure you can't be reached?

There are far better ways of achieving work-life balance than blocking emails from colleagues or clients after hours.

Whenever I read comments like that, it tells me that the writer either doesn't like his or her job, or doesn't like his or her colleagues, or both.