How to Improve Work-Life Balance in Finance: 4 Steps
LAST UPDATED: July 20, 2026
If you've been following along, this is the third blog post in my series on work-life balance.
In the first post, I shared why I don't think balance is a static state that you achieve and then maintain forever. Instead, it's an ongoing process of adjusting to changing circumstances.
In the second post, I shared why not all work-life imbalance is bad. Some imbalance is intentional and meaningful. Some isn't. The key is understanding the difference.
Now, I want to talk about the practical side of balance.
How do you actually go about improving work-life balance?
If you want to improve your work-life balance, don’t start by trying to create the perfect schedule.
Start by:
1. Understanding how you’re spending your time now.
2. Deciding how you’d rather spend it.
3. Identifying what’s getting in the way.
4. Evaluating the results, making adjustments, and repeating the process.
That’s the process I’m going to walk through in this post.
Because improving work-life balance usually isn’t about making one big change. It’s about paying attention to what’s happening right now, making intentional adjustments, evaluating the results, and continuing to adjust as the demands of work and life change.
Why the Perfect Plan Isn't the Answer
A fresh start feels good for a reason.
Whether it's a new year, a new quarter, a Monday morning, or a brand-new planner, it creates a natural pause point. It gives us a chance to reflect, reset, and decide what we want to do differently.
That's valuable.
Many positive changes start this way.
The Problem Isn’t the New Plan or the New Routine
The problem is that we often expect the fresh start itself to do the heavy lifting.
We buy the new planner. We create the new plan. We map out the perfect week.
Then reality hits.
A stakeholder needs something. A meeting gets added. A deadline moves. A team member needs support.
The day doesn't go according to plan.
When that happens? You assume the plan failed.
But that's not actually the problem.
The problem is believing that work-life balance comes from creating the perfect plan rather than learning how to continuously adjust the plan as circumstances change.
As a finance professional, you know this intuitively at work.
Budgets are set.
Priorities shift.
Forecasts get updated.
Plans get adjusted.
Yet many of us expect our personal plans to survive reality untouched.
They won't.
And they don't need to.
Four Steps to Improve Work-Life Balance for Finance Professionals
Finance professionals already know how to do this.
Every day at work, we evaluate results, identify issues, test solutions, and make adjustments. Yet, we rarely apply that same process to how we work and live.
Instead, we look for the perfect planner, routine, app, or a fresh start.
But work-life balance isn't improved through one big change. More often, it comes from paying attention to what's happening right now, making a few intentional adjustments, evaluating the results, and repeating the process.
Simple.
Not always easy.
But incredibly effective over time.
Here's where I suggest you start.
Step 1: Understand How You're Spending Your Time
Before you can improve anything, you need to understand what's happening right now.
When clients start paying attention to how they spend their time, they're often surprised by what they discover.
Meetings that weren't necessary right now.
Reactive work consuming large portions of the day.
Very little time spent on deep work and their own key deliverables.
A lack of planning, thinking, reviewing, or prioritizing time.
I experienced this myself during my finance career.
One example was review work.
For years, I wasn't intentionally scheduling review time into my workday. As a result, reviews often spilled into evenings and weekends.
At first, it felt like a workload problem.
But when I looked more closely, I realized the bigger issue was how I was reviewing.
My objective wasn't simply to ensure work was accurate and met expectations.
My objective had somehow become making sure it was written the way I would have written it.
That's a common trap for managers.
It creates bottlenecks, rework, and a significant investment of your time with very little incremental value added. I won’t even start on how this makes your team members feel…
Once I became aware of what was happening, I was able to make adjustments.
But awareness had to come first.
Step 2: Decide How You'd Rather Spend Your Time
This is the step that many people never slow down long enough to do.
You know you're frustrated, overwhelmed, or working too much.
But you haven't clearly defined what you're trying to create instead.
Interestingly, when I work with finance professionals, they aren't usually asking for dramatically fewer responsibilities.
More often, they want more time for:
deep work and their own key deliverables
personal time
family time
And even those things aren't really the goal. The goal is what they create with more of their time back.
A workout isn't just a workout. It's a reminder of what you're capable of.
Dinner with your family isn't just dinner. It's connection.
A hobby isn't just a hobby. It's fun, creativity, flow, or getting lost in something you enjoy.
When we create a vision for work and life in coaching, we're often talking less about activities and more about the feelings people want to experience.
The activities are just one way of creating those feelings.
Step 3: Identify What's Getting in the Way
This is where the real work begins.
Most finance professionals I work with are capable of creating a plan. They often know what they want to do differently too.
They want to spend more time on their highest-value work.
They want to leave work at a reasonable time.
They want to protect time for a workout, dinner with their family, or something else that matters to them.
And then… they don’t.
So, the question becomes:
What got in the way?
The challenge often comes when reality inevitably disrupts the plan.
A new request arrives. A leader needs something. A meeting gets added. An unexpected issue arises.
Suddenly, the entire day gets reshuffled.
What often happens next is that people abandon the plan altogether.
The day becomes reactive. Then the week becomes reactive. Then the month becomes reactive.
Eventually they conclude that planning doesn't work.
But the issue isn't usually the plan.
And it may not be a time-management problem either.
Because knowing how you want to spend your time and actually spending it that way are two different things.
What gets in the way might be:
unclear priorities
perfectionism
spending too much time reviewing or redoing other people’s work
difficulty delegating
avoiding a conversation
making assumptions about what a leader or stakeholder expects
automatically treating every new request as urgent
feeling like it’s faster or easier to just do something yourself
not knowing what you want the reclaimed time for
For example, you may assume the problem is that you have too much work.
But when you look more closely, you might realize that you’re spending hours reviewing work to a standard no one asked for.
Or holding onto work someone on your team could own.
Or immediately reshuffling your priorities every time a new request comes in without stopping to clarify when it is actually needed.
Or avoiding a conversation that could change the situation entirely.
This is why what looks like a time management problem often isn’t really a time management problem.
The calendar may be where the problem shows up.
But the real opportunity may be in how you prioritize, delegate, communicate, lead, or respond to the expectations around you.
That’s why simply creating a better plan often isn’t enough.
You have to understand what keeps getting in the way of following it.
Work-life balance doesn't require perfect execution.
It requires frequent reassessment.
Step 4: Evaluate, Adjust, and Repeat
This is the step that most people want to skip.
They want the perfect system. The perfect planner. The perfect routine.
Something that solves the problem once and for all.
But balance doesn't work that way.
One client I worked with believed their workload was the primary issue.
As we worked together, we discovered that a significant opportunity existed in how they were spending their time.
Specifically, they needed to become clearer about the leader they wanted to be.
Once they did, they spent less time managing and more time leading.
They stopped becoming the bottleneck. There was less rework. Their team became more capable and accountable.
They created more space for their own deep work and key deliverables.
As a result, they felt more accomplished during the workday because they were delivering what their stakeholders expected from them - not just what they expected from their team.
And because work became more intentional, they also created more time for themselves outside of work.
The workload hadn't disappeared.
But their experience of it changed.
Applying Continuous Improvement to Yourself
One thing I've noticed after more than two decades in finance is that finance professionals don't lack discipline.
They also don't lack the ability to improve systems.
We're constantly evaluating results, identifying issues, making adjustments, and improving processes.
We do it every day.
What many haven't done is apply that same continuous improvement mindset to themselves.
Work-life balance is no different.
Observe. Evaluate. Adjust. Repeat.
Not once. Continuously.
Final Thoughts on Work-Life Balance for Finance Professionals
If there's one thing I hope you take away from this blog post, it's this:
Work-life balance isn't something you achieve.
It's something you practice.
No planner, routine, app, or fresh start will permanently solve it for you on its own.
Those things can absolutely help. In fact, they can be a great place to start.
But lasting change comes from paying attention to how you're spending your time, deciding what matters most, making adjustments when circumstances change, and repeating that process over and over again.
So, before you try to overhaul everything, start here:
Track your time for a week. All you need is a blank sheet of paper or fresh note on your phone. Reflect over lunch – what did I do in every 30-minute (or so) increment? Then reflect again at the end of your work day.
Pay attention.
Then ask yourself:
Where did I spend my time intentionally?
Where did I spend it reacting?
And where could I have made a different choice?
You might discover that there is more room for what matters most than you think.
Get Help Putting This Into Practice
If this resonated with you, don't start by trying to change everything all at one.
Start by becoming more intentional about how you spend your time – week by week.
That's one of the reasons I created my weekly planning template.
It helps you connect your day-to-day decisions to your bigger goals so you're not just reacting to whatever shows up on your calendar.
Use it to:
Identify what matters most this week
Create space for your highest priorities
Evaluate how your time is actually being spent
Make adjustments as circumstances change
Because work-life balance isn't created by a planner.
But a planner can be a valuable tool for practicing the habits that create it.
👉 Grab the Plan Your Week Template HERE.
This Is Part 3 of My Work-Life Balance in Finance Series
This post is the third in a three-part series about creating work-life balance in a demanding finance career:
1. Is Work-Life Balance in Finance Even Possible? Realistically
2. Work-Life Balance in Finance: Why Not All Imbalance Is Bad
3. How to Improve Work-Life Balance in Finance: 4 Steps
Related Reading
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A Busy Season Survival Kit for Finance Professionals
Practical shifts that can help you navigate high-pressure seasons without defaulting to overworking and survival mode.
New Year Goal Setting for Busy Finance Professionals (When Q1 Is Busy Season)
A more sustainable approach to goal setting when your time, energy, and attention are already stretched.
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