The slippery slope of working from home
TL;DR
It’s no small thing to create a separation between your work and home life when the two are literally happening in the same physical environment. But here’s the thing: If you don’t make this a priority, you could find yourself overworking, and on a slippery slope toward BURNOUT.
Have you tried to set boundaries for yourself when working from home with little to no success?
You know, like you end up doing the laundry or dishes or any other house chore you can get your hands on for a sense of completion instead of the work email you have been avoiding.
Or the flip side, it’s 10pm and you said you would stop working but your desk is right there in your bedroom and it’s just one more email and then you are in bed working when you promised yourself wouldn’t be… (I swear I’m not watching you, this is an “I-spot-it-cuz-I-got-it” moment!)
I really do get it.
We moved during the pandemic and my office is in my bedroom and there are times where it is super unclear when I’m “at work” and when I’m not.
It’s no small thing to create a separation between your work life and home life when the two are literally happening in the same physical environment.
But here’s the thing: If you don’t make this a priority, you could find yourself overworking, and on a slippery slope toward BURNOUT.
Case in point: meet one of my clients, we’ll call him Anthony.
Anthony may as well be the poster child for the “All Work; No Life” mentality. He is a film composer, and for the last couple of years, he’d been building a name for himself by scoring as many low-budget independent films as he could fit into his schedule. He has a small studio in his apartment, and he spends nearly all of his time at home sliding his chair back-and-forth between his computer and keyboards.
The fact that his living and work spaces are one-and-the-same makes it extremely difficult for Anthony to separate the two, and what he found was that he couldn’t stop working if he was at home.
Sound familiar?
If he had time to relax, he figured that it was time that could be spent composing music. During our sessions, it was clear that Anthony was running on empty because he had no boundaries in place between his home life and his work.
He considered indulging in downtime a lack of ambition, and this posed a special challenge since his home was also his studio — it meant that he could never fully relax in his own apartment.
Anthony had reached a level of stress that was heading in a dangerous direction.
Clearly, something had to give.
Our coaching solution?
Watch this.
We started out by setting up specific office hours during which Anthony would work on his compositions. It took some convincing, but he eventually took to the idea that his home office was closed for business outside of those hours.
He even bought a lock for his studio room and locked up for the day when he was done!
At first, it wasn’t easy for Anthony to stick to his office hours, but the more he practiced them, the better he became at honoring this separation of work time at home.
He realized that part of the reason it got this out of hand was because he had never invested in making his apartment a relaxing place — he had been too focused on work.
Next, Anthony took the time to make his apartment a space that he actually wanted to be in!
He invested in a new couch, set up a reading chair in his favorite corner of his apartment where he put some books he has been wanting to read for pleasure out and in plain sight, and he even decided to renew his New Yorker subscription so he could go back to reading a physical copy instead of staring at his computer.
It took a little bit of time and dedication to changing old habits, but Anthony eventually began to feel more balanced at home.
All right. Your Turn.
If you are looking for more balance when working from home, here’s my inquiry for you…
What’s one thing you can do this week to create more separation between your work and home life?
I don’t care how small it is — maybe you make a little sign that says “Office Closed,” or you put your work files in a drawer instead of leaving them out on the desk in sight. This is about being conscious of how much one area bleeds into the other and putting an emphasis on baby steps. Trust me: making a point to NOT work during your downtime is going to make ALL the difference.
Here’s to making working from home work for YOU!
Betsy