In 2020, a global health crisis changed lives everywhere in numerous ways. Everyone’s professional lives have been dramatically altered from rushing out of the door early in the morning and commuting to working remotely.
When we think about life before the pandemic, we remember spending hours in rush hour traffic, then getting home and spending time unwinding with a book or in front of the television. Then, there was a clear distinction between our work and home lives, but after 2020, that line has long since blurred.
Now, we roll out of bed five minutes before it’s time to sign in for the day, then spend the rest of our time working in sweatpants with uncombed hair.
It can be challenging to separate your work life from your home life, especially since we’re all working in the same place you relax in.
As challenging as it is to try and separate work from home while working at home, it’s essential to set some boundaries.
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Here are 4 tips to separate your home life from your work life
Switch off at the end of the day
This might sound like the most prominent piece of advice that anyone could give, but switching your work devices off at the end of the workday can be hard to do.
While working from home, you probably feel a sense of obligation to be on call all the time, simply because you are at home. Even though you might have been working from home for over a year, you might find yourself feeling guilty about relaxing when you’re off the clock, again, because you’re at home, a place you typically associate with relaxation.
Learning how to change your mind about this is tough, but think about it. When you picture life before Covid, the distinction between work life and home was a clear one, and you had no problem with leaving work at the door when you got home.
Our advice:
- As soon as you’ve finished your daily tasks, switch your laptop off and mute notifications from your computer and phone that are work-related.
- Fight the urge to respond to work-related notifications, and establish a boundary between time spent working and time spent relaxing.
- When you sign out, make sure that you sign out physically and mentally.
Don’t log in as soon as you’re awake
Logging in as soon as you roll out of bed is tempting. Unfortunately, your desk might be right next to your bed, and your laptop is probably fully charged. Don’t do this.
Instead, try this:
- Establish a routine that works for you. This doesn’t necessarily mean that you need to do a series of highly productive tasks, like working out for 45 minutes, showering, eating breakfast, and doing laundry, then working tirelessly for the rest of the day.
- Instead, figure out what tasks work well for you before signing in, and then make a conscious effort to implement those tasks in your routine before you sign in.
- Doing a few tasks that differ from your job will help you get into a productive headspace without making you feel overwhelmed by how much you need to do.
If you sign in as soon as you’re conscious in the morning, it can start to harm your mental health. For example, you will wake up feeling stressed and anxious about the tasks that lie ahead of you, and you may start to hate your job because it might feel like you can’t separate it from your home life.
Create a separate workspace
If you are lucky enough to inhabit a space that allows you to work in a different area than where you relax, make a change as soon as you can! The process of creating a separate workspace within your home can help create a more visible work-home balance.
Suppose you have a separate room that you can treat as a workspace in your home; you could try out these tips to help you create the balance you crave:
- Don’t treat your workspace as anything other than a place of work. For instance, you might have an unused second bedroom, or you could work from your kitchen table.
- When you enter the space to start doing work, try to dedicate that space to work alone. Then, when you finish your tasks for the day, leave your laptop or tablet and other work-related items in your workspace, and return to it the next day. Keeping your physical workspace separate from the rest of your home can help create a separation between where you work and where you relax.
Of course, we understand that not everyone has the privilege of treating a second space in their home as a workspace. In that case, the last tip on our list could help you with this!
Leave your work in its space when the day is over
Most people across the world have spent the past year working from their bedrooms or place of rest. If you are someone who has been working from your bedroom throughout the pandemic, this tip might greatly help you.
- Once the day is over and you’ve completed your work, leave your work in its space and go about the rest of your day.
- Don’t take your laptop into your bed to send one last email or start a new task to complete later. Instead, simply turn your devices off, leave them on the desk, or, if possible, put your devices into a drawer.
- In other words, keep the work in the place you do it, and don’t bring the work into other physical areas of your home.
- While this could be challenging, it helps you create a sorely needed balance between work and home life.
Over the past year, the balance between work and home from our previous lives has shifted dramatically, and we’ve all had to make changes. Now, restoring a new kind of balance is difficult simply because this lifestyle is unique to everyone.
By taking a step forward to make sure that your home life is separate from your work life while still at home, you are helping yourself take care of your mental health and overall wellbeing.
