We all know that during the international moving peak-season (May–August), we movers have probably 10 minutes to breathe, in total. We wake up to quadruple number of emails, fighting with the world and its sister for every free slot to pack or deliver, and envy our colleagues at the office and abroad who were lucky enough to take few days off for vacation. But the stress doesn’t end after the peak season is over. People move year-round, and it’s hard to simply log-off and be away for a while in order to do what we need the most—breathe and regenerate.

This workload takes its toll on each and every one of us and may, at times, even overtake time that should be spent on personal life. This is the point when one needs to stop and reroute his approach to work-life harmony before the stress has serious affects. Let me share you with some work experience “lesson learned” I gathered through the years:

“I’ll stay a bit longer at the office and clear some tasks so I can have clean sheet tomorrow.” This isn’t going to happen. Work never stops! New day, new issues—some of which are more urgent than others. Do the best you can do, but learn to let go. Close your workspace and go home. You are working with international agents and when you go to sleep it is their workday and they will forward work to you, and that’s our industry.

“I’ll take some work home, it’s quiet there, it will take me only an hour.” You know it is going to take way more than that. You will see incoming emails, start responding and you find yourself close to midnight after eating poor man’s dinner because you were too busy to cook something decent—and we haven’t even started talking about quality time with your family or friends. Your laptop is not family. You are not on its will of inheritance if it dies. Trust me.

“I must reply to this email ASAP, time is money.” Not quite. Did you ever think that if you reply to, say, a rate request within 2–3 minutes it may seem like you just did a copy/paste instead of reading it, doing your math, and replying with few personal words? Sometimes it’s better to be smart, rather than right.

“Take a day-off to do NOTHING.” Yes, doing nothing was found by medical experts to be an effective over-the-counter remedy for work exhaustion. It’s okay to let your work colleagues know you will be almost unreachable, and same goes to your OOO auto-reply on your mailbox. You will be amazed what one day of lazing around, doing some dumb stuff and simply enjoying the time away from your responsibilities can do to reduce your stress level. It’s okay to come back the day after to an inbox full of unread emails, because if you work in a company that supports workers taking a day off to unwind, they will cover you and you’ll simply delete most of the emails. P.S.—if the thought of pulling longer on the day after popped to your head, see “lesson learned” #1.

To conclude my article and summarize my approach to work-life harmony, it all depends on you. Yes, YOU! When you decide to balance work-life harmony and not let one take over the other, you will reach an optimal balance suitable to you, and if you found my “lessons learned” helpful, it means you already took the first step towards balance.