While many professionals dream of work-from-home opportunities, merging your career with your personal life isn’t always as idyllic as it sounds. Work life harmony requires a ton of focus and patience!
As a Transaction Coordinator, the battle for balance is neverending. But trust me: you can achieve greater work life harmony—and it’s easier than you think.
What Is Work Life Harmony?
To start, work life harmony is not rushing to finish your laundry in the middle of a conference call with a real estate agent, or missing your child’s recital to finish closing documents. If your work and life collide like this, you’ve got it all wrong.
Work life harmony means being able to compartmentalize your workload and your personal life, even if they share space. It relies heavily on your ability to set boundaries and stick to them!
Essentially, work life harmony falls into place when you figure out ways to create distance between the different areas of your life (even when there really isn’t any). Wash off the facade of “togetherness” in order to achieve truer balance, peace of mind, and genuine happiness.
10 Tips for Achieving Work Life Harmony as a Transaction Coordinator
If you need better balance in your transaction coordination career, know that work life harmony is within your reach. Try one or all of these ten tips to improve the relationship between work and life at home.
Start Your Day With a No-Work Morning Routine
Think about it: if you were working in an office, you’d hold off on work-related tasks until you arrived at your desk. Why should it be any different in your at-home role?
It’s essential to carve out adequate time each morning to ground yourself and practice self-care. Enjoy a cup of coffee, take a shower, or read a chapter of a good book before you even glance at your workstation.
Starting the day focused on you and your family (rather than your eager real estate agent clients) ensures the “you” time you deserve.
Build a Schedule and Stick to It
In order to achieve work life harmony, you’ll need to set boundaries where there are naturally none. Just because you can weave between dirty dishes and client calls doesn’t mean you should.
By creating a hard-and-fast schedule, you guarantee a certain amount of undivided attention for your Transaction Coordinator tasks and your spouse, parent, homekeeper, and hobbyist tasks ( to name a few).
For example, if you decide that 10:00 AM to 12:00 PM is for drafting closing documents, but 12:00 PM to 1:00 PM is for lunch and playing peek-a-boo with your niece, make it so!
Always Prioritize Your Health
The instant that transaction coordination starts to outshine your physical, mental, or emotional health, you need to take a step back and recalibrate. Burnout doesn’t win you awards!
Allow yourself access to a well-being toolkit in order to establish work life harmony:
- Sick days
- Adequate breaks during the day
- Time for exercise and eating well
- Therapy, meditation, or journaling to keep bad thoughts at bay
The healthier you are, the better work you’ll do and the more business you can grow (within your means). Odds are your clients and your family will appreciate your proactive approach to overall wellness.
Related: How To Avoid Burnout As An Entrepreneur In Your Transaction Coordinator Business
Keep Your Work to a Designated Office Space
It’s so tempting to creep out of your workspace and plop down on the sofa with your workload. But resist! Establishing work life harmony means containing each side of the balance scale.
This concept is especially difficult with access to emails through your phone 24/7. But here’s the thing: work can always wait. Your work as a Transaction Coordinator is important, but let’s not act as though lives are hanging in the balance if you don’t respond to messages right away.
What’s more, your clients will learn to wait if you establish boundaries from the start. So there will never be a need to hit “reply” while brushing your teeth, feeding the dog, or washing up in the bathroom. Keep work at your desk!
Unplug Often to Reach Work Life Harmony
Decades ago people took pictures with a camera, watched the news on television, and made calls on telephones. Today, everything between work and home intertwines with the same technology. So even if you don’t want to know about a message from a real estate agent, it will still pop up on your screen in the middle of your evening TikTok binge.
Be sure to carve out breaks from all screens. Your role as a Transaction Coordinator is almost exclusively behind your computer—it’s enough to make you go cross-eyed at first!
Anchor at least part of your down time off-screen to create better work life harmony. And don’t feel like you have to read work messages that come through during your off hours. They can wait!
Take a Proper Lunch Break Each Day
Do you even taste your lunch when you eat it at your desk? Lunch can only contribute to work life harmony when you take an actual break to prepare and enjoy it.
You may think that eating at your desk is a sign of multi-tasking mastery, but there’s nothing masterful about splitting your attention (or getting crumbs on your keys). In fact, you’re likely to get loads more work done when you give yourself a change of environment and time to do lunch right.
When you afford yourself a true break around lunch time, you can nourish your body with good food, give your mind a chance to recharge, and get back to work with renewed energy.
Actually Take Time Off
Most work-from-home folks see the beauty in being able to work from anywhere. But that doesn’t mean you should carry work with you all the time.
Vacation mode is sacred! And sometimes you need more than a weekend off from the hustle and bustle of Transaction Coordinator life.
The golden rule: never leave behind your vacation days. Take every opportunity to plan plenty of time off with family, friends, traveling… whatever! Houses will still be selling when you get back to work.
Dedicate Time to Your Hobbies
Believe it or not, hobbies bring quite a bit of value into your life. If you can’t pinpoint what they are for you, take the time to explore different hobbies and claim one as your own for better work life harmony.
A hobby can be as simple as sketching, as general as exercising, or as specific as restoring old tractors. The things that bring you pleasure give you fuel to continue working at your best.
You never want to reach a place of resentment towards your role as a Transaction Coordinator (which has you doing quite a bit for other people). Do more for yourself by carving out hobby time!
Make Plans After Your Work Hours
When you work and live in the same space, getting out for other reasons becomes urgent. What do you usually do when you close your laptop and end calls for the day? Switching from one room to another isn’t always enough.
For many Transaction Coordinators, evenings are the perfect time of day to run errands, schedule time at the gym, or meet up with friends for dinner and drinks. If you’re not leaving the house, be sure to pencil in time that feels dramatically different from drafting legal documents. (For example, switching from work emails to private emails probably isn’t enough of a contrast after a long day’s work.)
Just make sure there’s enough variety happening each day (each week at minimum) to avoid going completely stir crazy under the same roof all the time.
Spend Time With Family
Perhaps the most valuable tool to maintain work life harmony is family. But perhaps “tool” isn’t the best word, because your family members aren’t merely hammers and chisels at your disposal. They need you to reciprocate their love and attention.
Hugs and kisses as your kids pass by your desk isn’t enough! Hours of each and every day belong to those you care about. So, if you can’t maintain balance for yourself, do it for them.
Schedule time to call your grandpa! Visit your parents for Tuesday dinner. Play (really turn on your imagination) with your kids—intentionally, not just by chance. The financial security you contribute to your family as a Transaction Coordinator means nothing if they don’t feel your affection otherwise.
One of the key advantages to having a career as a Transaction Coordinator is the ability to establish work life harmony. But it takes work! If you don’t feel balanced between work and home, it’s time to make some changes.
