It is a good idea to balance the load on the two busses, that is not the same thing as balancing the load on each side.

Look at the tabs in your box, you will notice that they alternate which bus they are on. Tabs 1,3,5... are on one bus, and tabs 2,4,6... are on the other bus. Each bus is powered by one of the two large lines that come from the power company. The third (smaller) line is the neutral, it carries only the current from the unbalanced loads.

240V breakers connect to two tabs, one each bus, so they spread their load on both busses.

Spread the one tab breakers over both busses and you will very likely have a reasonable balance.

In a home it is unlikely that you have any great load imbalance. With the diversity of loads that are not used continuously it is hard to even have an (notable) imbalance.

Panels are designed to help eliminate load imbalance. If you go from the top down with your breakers you did pretty much all you can (need to) do.

this makes sense, thank you all

The old 4 circuit 60 amp panels often were quite unbalanced. Perhaps many were replaced because one of the main fuses kept blowing when a proper balance in the panel is all that was needed. The newest panels would require an active effort and some odd installations of breakers to have a significant imbalance.

guyinacoldhouse said:

"Look at the tabs in your box, you will notice that they alternate which bus they are on. Tabs 1,3,5... are on one bus, and tabs 2,4,6... are on the other bus...."

Actually, I believe breaker slots 1 and 3 are on different busses. That's why a 240 double breaker taking up two slots next to each other on the same side of the panel (for example, occupying slots 1 and 3) is automatically balanced. So the pattern goes: slots 1,4,5,8,9,12,13 etc are all on the same bus, while slots 2,3,6,7,10,11 etc are on the other bus.