HOW THIS TEST WORKS
How How Balanced Is My Work and Life? works
How version core-v1 is scored, and what it can and cannot tell you.
How it is scored
Work-life balance means having enough time and energy for work and also for rest, people, and things that matter to you. Research links long working hours with poorer health (Virtanen and others, 2012), links work that spills into home life with more strain and conflict (Allen and others, 2000), and finds that people recover better when they can mentally step away from work (Sonnentag and Fritz, 2007). Close relationships are also strongly linked with health (Holt-Lunstad and others, 2010).
This test looks at five areas: keeping work in its place, switching off your mind, rest and health, time for people, and time for things you enjoy. Each area has eight sentences. Four describe a healthy habit and four describe the opposite. Each answer gives 0 to 4 points. Each area score runs from 0 to 100, and your overall score is the average of the five.
PersonalitySite.com wrote all of these questions and descriptions. They are not copied from any other test.
What it cannot tell you
This test is for learning about yourself. It is not a diagnosis. It cannot tell you if you have burnout, depression, or any other condition. Do not use it to hire, judge, rank, or label people.
A lower score does not mean you are doing it wrong. A heavy workload, shift work, low pay, and caring for others can make balance very hard, and they are not personal failings. Balance also looks different for different people, jobs, and stages of life.
This version has not yet been tested with a large group of people, so we do not yet know how accurate it is.