Saturday, August 2, 2008

Separating Work From Home

By Rachel Rae


There is a simple philosophy that I live by to help maintain peace and harmony in life, and that is what happens at work stays at work and what happens at home stays at home. Letting the two worlds impact one another can have devastating effects on both areas of your world. This can be especially challenging for people that work from home.

Of course after I say that I need to clarify. I also believe that your job takes at least eight hours of your day, and that being able to share that time with your spouse is important. Talking about it is one thing, coming home and taking it out on your family is something else.

Tip One: Use your commute time to shift gears mentally from letting go of the day at work, and begin thinking about your family.

This strategy is more geared for people who work outside of the house, it's important. However long your commute from work to home is, use that time to work through work issues somewhat and then focus on what you have to look forward to at home. Think about your loved ones and what their day might have been like.

Strategy Two: Create a Schedule

You might need to think outside of the box when you work from home. There's a tendency to put in more work hours when you work from home, simply because there's not clear boundaries of work hours. Maybe you can work after the kids have gone to bed, or early in the morning. But look at the schedule of your family and see if you can find times in their day when their needs are less and use that for work hours.

Three: Get Different Phone lines

If you are finding that you are getting business phone calls at all hours, having a separate number for them to call can be a wonderful option. You also have the choice to making your cell phone your business phone and the home phone personal. This way when business hours are over, you can walk away and leave those calls to be picked up by an answering device. You can also separate the rings for people you know personally and business so you don't have so much cross over. Make boundaries.

Tip Four: Create a space that is separate from the house.

Do you have an extra room that could be used exclusively for this purpose? I know it's not always possible. Perhaps you could get inexpensive room partitions to create a work area. It's important that you try to make a space so that your roles can be separate and you can walk away from it when you need to. It also helps to keep family out of your work area as well.

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