Name: 6 tips to improve your work-life balance | BBC Ideas
Uploaded: 2019-02-14T08:19:35.000Z
Duration: 3 min 39 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

I work at Twitter but in my spare time, I've been studying work culture and how we can be happier at work.

Work has become this sort of colossal game of Jenga where we're trying to add things on top or still keep everything standing up and stable.

I've put together some thoughts on ways that we can make our lives a lot less stressful.

Half of all people who check their emails outside of work hours show signs of high levels of stress.

The very easiest thing you can do to reduce your stress levels from work is take the number off your email app; that single act is the simplest thing we can do to reduce our stress levels.

The second best change that anyone can make is to take a lunch break.

The habit of eating 'al desco' has become so common now it's contributing to an increase in our stress levels and I understand when you're sitting at your desk you're thinking you've got a hundred emails left walking away and taking a break can feel really counter-intuitive but scientists have found the best way to ensure that you feel energized is to take that pause.

You might want to try a monk mode morning.

More and more of us are finding it get hard to get things done because of all the interruptions.

A guy called Cal Newport who's a professor at Georgetown University in Washington, he wrote a book called Deep Work and one of the ideas he gave was that we should think about having a monk mode morning.

Well monk mode is where we go somewhere that is silent, there's no interruptions, we maybe get a block of ninety minutes work done, maybe twice a week, then we go to the office as normal, added advantages we've missed the commute, and got our emails and our meetings done.

Some interesting research from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology shows that one of the best ways to increase workplace creativity is to increase the amount of chat and actually that can be chat about last night's TV, that can be chat about what's happening in sports games because normally those conversations then lead to work discussions.

It's a strange thing that by encouraging people to have more chats we're actually going to be achieving more at work.

But the research seems to suggest that the most creative offices are the ones that chat the most.

Ben Waber, one of the researchers, said that one of the best ways to increase creativity in your office is to move the location of the coffee machine.

By having the coffee machine, the kettle, the water cooler, in a different place you'll actually lead to more people having discussions, conversations.

Scientists have found that one of the biggest barriers to being creative in our jobs is stress, and all of us with our phones feel more stressed than ever before.

You need to give yourself permission to have a digital Sabbath, to take time away from your work at the weekend, for a bit of refreshment, a bit of renewal.

Discourage your boss from emailing at the weekend because it leads to people feeling anxious when they come back to work on Monday.

I think in the current world we often celebrate overwork and people working long hours.

The magazine profiles we read, the TV profiles we see are about people who work these enormous long working weeks.

And in fact all of the evidence is starting to point to the fact that maybe that's not the best idea.

Maybe 40 hours of work a week is the right amount.

Use our breaks and our evenings as times to re-energize ourselves so when we come back to our desks we're full of life.

Doing 40 hours of work is probably enough.