Severance has officially returned to our screens for another season of its mind-bending, mysterious, and outright gripping twists and turns.

The show takes on the important conversation of work-life balance with a unique sci-fi twist.

In the series, regular office workers go through a procedure called, you guessed it, “severance”, which separates their work lives from their home lives.

As a result, one half of their consciousness (the “innie”) is always at work, while the other (the “outie”) never has to experience work at all.

Each half has no memories of the other half’s experiences, so for all intents and purposes, they are different people in the same body.

While the concept Severance presents is fictional, it resonates with a real-life challenge for many: maintaining a healthy work-life balance.

A recent report from Mental Health UK revealed that 35% of adults frequently or consistently experienced high or extreme levels of pressure and stress over the past year, with 54% citing a high or increased workload or volume of tasks as the cause of their stress.

So, what can you do to better manage the balance between your “innie” and your “outie”?

1. Find a schedule that works for you

When you’re busy, it can be easy to let work eat into your personal life. Maybe you find yourself answering an email before bedtime or checking your phone during a social event. However, doing this regularly can contribute to burnout by limiting your personal time and making it harder to rest up after a busy day.

Sometimes, busy projects may need a bit of extra time and commitment. Even so, it’s important to be mindful of respecting your work schedule and your personal schedule.

To help, establish clear start and end times for your workday, and avoid checking emails or tackling work-related tasks outside of these hours to create a consistent boundary between work and personal time.

If you find it difficult to handle your workload in these hours, perhaps try a different approach, like one of the handy techniques in this blog post that I wrote previously.

2. Respect your personal time

If you often find yourself working late or not having enough time to enjoy life outside of work, it might be that you’re not giving your personal time the respect it deserves.

Make your personal time a priority by planning activities you enjoy and treating them like unmissable work meetings.

If you’re an avid gym-goer, you could schedule an exercise class after work to give you a reason to leave and a place to be at a certain time. Or maybe you could make plans with a friend or family member, so you have a social obligation to leave “innie” mode and get into “outie” mode.

Making a genuine effort to use and respect your personal time like this is a great way to establish a boundary, and give yourself some much-needed time to switch off.

3. Do not disturb

Ding.

Your phone buzzes, the screen lights up, and within a split second, you’re back in your inbox, ripped from your relaxation and suddenly back in work mode.

Thanks to your smartphone, it’s all too easy to let work notifications interfere with your personal life. One moment you’re having a nice pint with a friend, the next you’re checking an email about a meeting being rearranged that could wait until tomorrow.

If the above describes you, you’re trapped in a digital office, and it’s important to leave it from time to time, just like you’d leave your regular office.

To avoid this, set your phone to automatically turn off work notifications at the end of your day, or use the handy “do not disturb” setting if you’re trying to enjoy your personal time.

Setting boundaries with your phone is a simple way to take back your personal time and actually unwind after work.

4. Practise the art of saying “no”

We all want to be helpful.

However, from time to time it’s important to learn how to respectfully decline additional work or commitments that exceed your capacity or interfere with your personal time, especially if you’re starting to feel like you’re always in “innie” mode and rarely in “outie” mode.

Saying no allows you to preserve your wellbeing without overloading yourself.

Of course, there are still ways you can be helpful without just saying no. Dan Sullivan’s book, Who Not How teaches some important lessons in this regard.

If you’re overloaded and have asked for help, don’t immediately jump to thinking, “How can I do this?”

Instead, think, “Who can do this for me?”

In our work lives, we’re often surrounded by talented colleagues with varied skill sets. Tap into their knowledge, check their capacity, or ask for a favour.

To use that age-old expression, teamwork makes the dream work!

5. Have a break, not a breakdown

While focusing on your time outside of work is important in maintaining a healthy work-life balance, it’s also crucial to think about what you can do at work to help.

Taking regular breaks throughout the day can be a great way to de-stress and may actually keep you more productive.

But don’t just take my word for it – look at the results gathered during a recent survey by Slack, which collected responses from more than 10,000 workers in the US, UK, Australia, France, Germany and Japan about their working habits:

To support your regular breaks, try the Pomodoro method, which lets you have a break for five minutes in every 30-minute work period.

Get up, grab a cup of tea, and go outside to breathe some fresh, non-office air for a few minutes. Your “innie” deserves a break from time to time!

6. Communicate boundaries with colleagues

In the first tip, we discussed finding a schedule that works for you, but an important addition to this is to make sure your colleagues are aware of your working hours.

Many of us have been guilty in the past of sending messages outside of working hours or answering work messages well into our “outie” time.

If you use a company-wide communication tool, see if you’re able to set a “status” to share your working hours with others. For example, at The Yardstick Agency, we use Slack to communicate internally.

On Slack, you can set a customisable status, which you can use to share your working hours with anybody who might need to message you. That way, if they start a conversation outside of those hours, they know they won’t get a reply.

To quote Art Attack, here’s one I made earlier:

Thanks to the above, my teammates know exactly when I’m available, and I’ve set a clear boundary for when I’m able to answer work-related queries.

Communication is crucial in maintaining a good work-life balance, so the clearer the information you can give, the better.

Severing your stress

It’s a constant battle to maintain a healthy work-life balance, but hopefully, the tips above will help your “innie” and your “outie” to make peace with one another.

Now I’m off to let my “outie” catch up on Severance, so if you have any questions, please direct them to my “innie”, who will respond tomorrow.

How we can help

As a financial adviser or planner, you might find it hard to respect your work-life balance, and your busy to-do list might mean your marketing efforts have fallen by the wayside.

We’re here to help.

Just email hi@theyardstickagency.co.uk or call 0115 8965 300, and we’ll set up a meeting.