How you are maintaining a work- life balance while working from home? Are you stretching your working hours, micro-managing the teams to check up on their productive hours?

I am making home work from more than 20 years ago, including it "in the ancient times" I did that by phone and emails. I could answer this from different views but i will say this: time and space do not exists, you create your time and space. So, it is up to you. Mainly if you are project/program manager where you are in control of the projects. On the other side, if you think and behave "micro-managing the temas to check up on their productive hours" you are lost, no matter you are working remotelly or inside the same office than your team.

I have worked from home for a number of years. Because I worked a lot with dispersed teams, I've also dropped the work "Balance", and refer to it as work-life integration. Hours are dependent on time zones and the team's normal hours.
Pre-pandemic times, I had some team members who were in the office at 7 and others there by 9. I anticipate they're keeping very similar schedules working from home. I'm not a micro-manager, nor do I feel anyone should be. I trust my team is doing their jobs and that comes out in the results they deliver. I do, though, "hyper-communicate" with them. That means I just check in to see how things are going, can I assist with anything, blockers, issues, and let them know how the rest of the team is doing.
The challenge I have had, and still have actually, is shutting down at the end of the day. I'll leave my computer running and check just one more time if an important email came in. That can lead to 30 minutes of working when in reality, it could have waited until the next day.
Jason

Aggressively checking if someone is doing a work or not and asking very frequently for status report about the work being done in my opinion does not count as micromanagement. Maybe it is and I am wrong but until someone convinces me otherwise I don't consider this micromanagement.

For me micromanagement involves two important parts: 1) Asking very frequently for the status of the working being done and 2) Giving very detailed instructions to the worker on how to do the work.

PMs can do part 1) but many of them can't do part 2) as this requires subject matter knowledge in the relevant line of work which many PMs don't have. In addition most PMs don't even have formal authority over their project team members and can't give them orders.

I imagine that some PMs may be worried that their project team members may not be as productive while working from home and the only thing they can do about it is to ask more frequently for status report. Just asking (even if frequently) without giving "commands" is not micromanagement in my opinion.

Probably some PMs think that the team members would feel ashamed to report little progress and if they ask more frequently the team members would be more efficient.

So I would say that we are not really talking about micromanagement but we are talking more about frequent requests for work progress reports.