If you’re anything like the rest of the working world, there’s a good chance you’ve spent a chunk of your 2020 working at home.
Despite the current circumstances of the world, you’ve found that you actually enjoy the remote work lifestyle much more than you thought you would. For starters, your commute went from a 30-minute drive to a 30-second walk down the stairs. Noisy deskmates or other interruptions have become a thing of the past. And let’s be honest—the occasional workday in sweats has never felt better.
But remote working can come at a cost: your ability to separate work from the rest of your life.
Especially if you’re new to the work-from-home game, achieving a healthy work-life balance is only more difficult when these two aspects of your life share the same space. During these times of uncertainty, it’s even more important to give yourself time to relax, recover, and prioritize your mental and physical wellness.
If you’re struggling with either burnout or a lack of motivation, here are a few handy tips to keep in mind during your remote work stint.
Set a Schedule
Most successful people make the most of their work hours by creating goals for what they want to accomplish day-to-day or week-to-week. But how often do you outline when you plan to get this work done?
Scheduling out your work hours—everything from your regularly scheduled meetings to your lunch break—helps you stay on target for what you need to achieve while reducing the number of extra work hours. Mapping out start and endcaps to your days can also help professionals who struggle to shut down their laptop for the remainder of the night.
Once you’ve drafted up a schedule for yourself, make sure that it’s visible for the rest of your remote team, so that they can avoid messaging or calling you during your personal time. One specific way to accomplish this is by sharing your calendar through an app with the rest of your remote team.
Connect With People That Aren’t Coworkers
The relationship between people and their coworkers is often an interesting one. Although you know your teammates primarily through a professional space, the modern office offers so many opportunities to connect with others at your workplace on a personal level, such as happy hour Fridays or brief conversations in the office kitchen.
As a remote worker, remember that these moments do not count as time completely away from your job. A healthy work-life balance means that you focus on cultivating your relationships with coworkers as well as your family, friends, and/or partner.
The present state of the world makes meeting with anyone—coworker, family member, or otherwise—either highly challenging or entirely impossible, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t creative solutions around this issue. As one example, many people have found that meeting through video conferencing tools is a great way to stay connected to colleagues and personal relationships alike.
Separate Your Spaces
Take a moment to look at your current workspace in your home. If you’re one of the lucky ones, you have an entire room devoted to your home office, perfectly furnished and organized. However, many have only recently made the rather abrupt switch to working from home. If you weren’t prepared for remote work, then there’s a good chance your office is also your bedroom, kitchen, or living room (or it’s all three, depending on the time of day).
If that sounds familiar, it’s important that you devote some of your space solely to working, whether that ends up being an entire room or an isolated corner. There are plenty of reasons why creating physical boundaries between work and home spaces can help with your work-life balance. Your desk, office chair, and extra monitor not only will help you work more effectively, but they also can help you get into the correct mindset to accomplish all of your daily tasks.
More importantly, when you bring your laptop into your kitchen or bedroom, it’s easy for your work to “bleed” into these areas, making it harder to wind down and relax in them at the end of the day.
Fortunately, separating your spaces doesn’t have to be a huge ordeal. Simple changes, such as using a bookshelf to partition the area or facing your desk away from the rest of the room, make an immense difference in cultivating a professional atmosphere, even from the comfort of your own home.
Practice Personal Wellness
No matter how much you love your job, the most important reason to balance the professional and the personal is to safeguard your mental and physical wellbeing. Burnout is real—it happens to the best of us, and it’s even easier to disengage from your work when you don’t have opportunities to be reinvigorated by your colleagues and office culture.
Even if you’re not able to shut down completely at 5 o’clock, always keep your limits in mind. How late can you work on any given night before it affects the next day’s performance? Is it absolutely essential to answer those late-night emails on your phone, or can it wait until tomorrow? And when you take personal time-off, are you able to entirely disconnect from your work?
To help their employees prioritize their personal wellness while working remotely, many organizations are now offering employee assistance programs, which include access to virtual counseling, helpful articles, and resources from the local community, to help people stay healthy in and outside of the office. If your employer offers EAP services, it’s a great way to begin your journey toward a healthier relationship between every area of your life.
