North Americans tend to struggle drawing a line between work and home. Living in such a tech-savvy world has created assumptions that employees have to be accessible outside of the hours of 9 to 5, which skews the balance between work and home. This article sheds light on how involved North Americans are in their work and ways we can shadow the European workforce in handling work-life balance.

Here are techniques to get your work life under control:

1. Take your work e-mail off your phone.

Some employees have gotten in to the habit of constantly checking their phone for work-related emails. This can lead to unnecessary stress which cuts into personal time. By taking your work email off of your phone, you will no longer stress over work-related issues in your personal time and the temptation to always be checking for emails will disappear. Normally colleagues will not notice if you reply at 9:30am instead of 9:30pm the night before.

2. Use you work laptop to do only work-related stuff and remove all your work-related stuff from your home computer.

Do your work at work and search the web in your personal time.

3. Only check into work at work.

Corresponding to the first point, checking work-related emails causes unnecessary stress. Stress from being overworked causes health issues which are a reason why you need a clear boundary between work and home life.

4. Make the most of your time at work.

By being as productive as you can at work, there will be less temptation to continue work at home as well as less stress over what you could have completed at work if you were more productive.

5. Turn off e-mail alerts and keep your browser minimized.

By controlling interruptions, you will have more time to focus on what you have to do and therefore be more productive. Limit your e-mail checks to every half hour rather than every time you receive an e-mail.

6.  Decline a meeting invitation if you’re not needed.

Going to a meeting you aren’t needed at just cuts time from your day to work on your important tasks. Create more time for yourself by declining these meeting invites or by asking for a time in the meeting you are needed at.