This study examines the impact of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) on the work-life balance of lecturers in private universities in Nigeria. The objective was to determine the extent, to which COVID-19 affected the productivity of lecturers with reference to research and teaching output between March and October, 2020. The target population involves all academic staff of private universities in Nigeria. Purposive sampling of non-probability method was used to select eight (8) private universities in Lagos State and Federal Capital Territory Abuja while Taro Yamane formula n= N/ (1+N (e) 2) was used to calculate the number of participants in the study. A self-constructed survey was developed and distributed online through Google Forms. Descriptive statistics with frequency distribution was used to analyse the demography of participants while linear regression was used to analyse responses from the survey. Based on the results, it was discovered that COVID-19 increased the family commitment and childcare practices of lecturers. Simultaneously, it exerted pressure on the lecturer to meet-up with online class activities, project supervision and research work. It was also observed that while the workload hours significantly decreased, the pressure to teach students through online applications (i.e Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google Classroom, etc) was very high with less productivity. The findings also indicate that lecturers in private universities could not effectively strike a balance between work and family during the global pandemic and therefore, were less productive especially in the areas of research and teaching output. Recommendations were made towards development of new work-life balance policies by the university management as well as retraining of lecturers in meeting up with the emerging needs of students and the university in a post COVID-19 world.