Working from Home
With more and more people working from home, we are all getting accustomed to the “new normal” that expects us to follow a workday routine from home. Without the tangible routine that gets us out of bed, ready for work, and out of the house, we are called to make our own distinctions between work time and down time in our home space.
Here are some tips to help you balance work life and home life, as well as reasonably separate the two:
- Physical Boundaries
The routine of getting ready for work in the morning, especially if you have a 9-to-5 schedule, actually helps your body and your mind understand that you are switching from home-version to work-version. Combined with the change in physical space, it is almost as if you switch functions and start your work mode as soon as you leave your home to go to work. However, when the home-version and work-version blend since many of us have to work from home now, the switch may prove more challenging.
One way to trick our brains is to follow the morning routine as usual: get up at the same time, get dressed as if we’re going out of the house to work, prepare ourselves mentally for the workday.
- Temporal Boundaries
Of course, the challenge of the blend may continue even if we manage to make our brains believe we are “at work” while staying in the house. This is especially true at the end of the workday or when it comes to breaks, since we technically do not leave the designated work area.
To give ourselves the necessary breaks from work, as well as to limit the workday to reasonable hours, it is important to set our own boundaries with time. This could include logging off when it’s time for lunch—or for any other break during the work day, getting up from our desk or the workspace, or even setting up out-of-office replies when we are taking time off. Just because we are working from home does not mean that the workday should bleed into our personal and family time.
- Focus on Important Work
Working from home may lead to an obsession with over-productivity: to counter the lack of physical presence in the workplace, both workers and employers feel compelled to push themselves to be overly productive when working remotely. At the very least, this is unrealistic: one’s home does not offer the same resources as one’s workplace. Even if an employee has the luxury of a designated workspace in their home, that does not always guarantee they have the necessary mental and emotional space to do more work than usual.
As such, instead of pushing for more productivity when the personal and work boundaries are so blurry, we should be prioritizing the most important work tasks and focusing on those.
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