When your home becomes your workplace, some lines can be blurred. Follow these tips to help establish boundaries that serve you and your mental health.
We live in a society of constant hustle. We’ve created this idea that anything less than busyness is laziness. However, it’s important to know: this isn’t realistic. We have to set boundaries for ourselves in order to rest and recharge.
For the majority of us, work and home are two separate places for a reason. Both require our attention and effort but in different ways. When working from home, two worlds collide and it’s difficult for them to be separate. Here are a few ways to ensure time away from work while working from home.
Take an actual lunch break away from notifications and your computer
Work breaks should always be a part of our schedule, whether at work or at home. It’s easy to skip breaks while working at home and continue past designated hours. To make sure this doesn’t happen, we need to create a plan to set ourselves up for success every day.
To set yourself up for success, make a habit of ensuring you have an actual lunch break away from work. Close the laptop, silence the notifications, and remind yourself to remove your mind from work for a bit. Breaks refresh us mentally and physically keeping us alert and away from potential burnout.
Use your vacation time
Even with travel restrictions, it’s important to take time away from work. Get your staycation on or plan a personal retreat day. Healium offers great virtual vacation options. Escape to the beach, a meadow, watch the seasons change, or float into the Nebula. Through immersion, Healium allows you to rest mentally and physically.
Taking your vacation time can bring a lot of health benefits, productivity, and success in your work. You will be relaxed, satisfied, and productive if you take time away from work. Whether a destination vacation or staycation, it’s important to take time to recharge and remind yourself life is not just about work.
Have a hard stop to your workday
It’s easy to keep working for just another 15 or 30 minutes, but setting boundaries is crucial for you to feel less stressed and ensure all your time and effort isn’t going to one place. Setting boundaries is also important for others, as they know when they can expect to reach you.
Studies show that remote workers work 1.4 more days per month than when in the office. This adds up to more than three additional weeks of work per year. To eliminate the possibility of additional work, establish a hard stop time to your daily work schedule. Don’t check your email before or after the established workday begins and ends. When a specific time is sketched out in your day exclusively for work, you feel much more productive and less overwhelmed.
Schedule time with yourself
If you don’t schedule time with yourself, others will do it for you. How many times do you let people put a date on your calendar? How often do you block out time for yourself? It’s healthy to take a night to yourself instead of doing additional work or going out with friends.
Start making yourself a priority. Scheduling in “me time” isn’t really time with yourself unless you enforce strict boundaries. Put down the electronics, turn off the tv, and focus on yourself.
Create space to transition from work to home
Create a new morning or after work routine that helps you transition from home to work and vice versa. Having a transition from work life to home life prevents constant stress and lets your brain know that it’s time to stop thinking about work.
Perhaps the only “me time” you had was the daily commute to your workplace. Try replacing your commute with a walk around the neighborhood with your favorite podcast, take time to journal before bed, or find a new hobby that you can spend just 10 minutes doing before the workday starts. Working from home provides new ways to step away and find your space. Schedule something in your daily routine that signals when work is finished and life after work begins.
It’s crucial to continue to find ways to unwind and create space for yourself while working from home. Work doesn’t have to collide with your home life. Make time to continue keeping them at a distance from each other and ensuring designated “me time” throughout the workweek.
