The Invisible Line: How to Maintain Work/Life Balance While Working from Home

Keeping work-life and life-life separate and balanced is already challenging for most of us. But what happens when the everyday physical boundaries between the two are removed, and we begin working from home? 

Americans are working from home at unprecedented rates. Rates that our society may not have been prepared to move toward so quickly, but did so out of necessity due to COVID-19—but that’s beside the point. We are here and living it. 

There are perks to working from home for sure: cut down on cost of transportation, cut down on carbon footprint, make and eat lunch from your own kitchen, and even have your fur children in your lap or by your side.

It’s true, most of us who work from home enjoy it for these reasons and many more, but what are the drawbacks?

Blurred Line = Blurred Boundary

Have you noticed you’ve been getting less or worse sleep since working from home? Have you noticed feeling less motivated after work hours? Noticed that your work hours have seemed to expand a bit? What about increased negative feelings toward colleagues and supervisors? How about increased frustration toward loved ones, or increased stress/pressure to get more things done for both work and personal life since you “have so much more time”?

You see where I’m going with this? 

The tendency to demand maximum efficiency of ourselves begins to weigh on us. We begin to see work and home life as the same. Well, then how do we get appropriate breaks from either?

We have to find some way to keep them separate. But how? Let’s start by identifying the potential problem areas…

How It Hurts Us

First, we tend to place a lot of pressure on ourselves when we bring our work into our homes. For instance, “Now that I don’t have to drive 30 minutes to work, I can make that extra phone call for work, or get some dishes done before I hop on the computer to start my day.”

Or maybe we think to ourselves: “My partner has to go into the office and I don’t, so instead of my 15-minute break, I’ll do the laundry—it’s only fair, right?”

Additionally, we lack the transition we once had between home and the office. The human brain requires clues that it’s transitioning from one part of your everyday life to another, otherwise they meld together. This is exemplified in many sleep hygiene studies that note you should only use your bed for sleep, because otherwise you are conditioning your brain to be awake in your sleep space!

Brains are powerful, but are also highly susceptible to conditioning. This can make things tricky.

Also think about the disconnect from colleagues, and the tendency to misread tone in e-mail and text! We all know how that can go. Often we are used to being friends with our colleagues and sharing the day together, and when that disappears, we struggle to make the most generous assumptions of one another. At best we just plain feel isolated and lonely.

Finally, another byproduct of working from home can come from resentment toward family, friends, and others who expect more of you since you are working from home. This can erode on emotional intimacy and make us feel even more isolated.

Okay, so now we know what we love about working from home and what hurts us. What do we do to manage these boundaries better, and help our brain and the people around us understand when we are in “work mode” or “home mode” as well as what our limitations are?

Tips for Managing Work-Home Boundaries

1. Transitions help! Even though you aren’t driving into the office, you can create a sort of synthetic transition. Take a drive to a local coffee shop, or even just take a long walk. This helps with separating work and home in both time and space.
2. Your senses matter! When you go into the office, your 5 senses experience different stimuli than when you are at home, and this also helps separate the two environments emotionally and mentally. Try thinking of ways you can change the smell, lighting, sounds, and tactile sensations in the room for when you are in “work mode” and then change them again for when you are in “home mode.”
3. Don’t mess with the bedroom! It’s your sanctuary! It’s sacred! As noted above, most sleep hygiene resources will tell you that your bed and bedroom should be for sleep and sex. When you fold laundry, pay bills, or WORK FROM HOME in bed, you are messin’ with your sleep. Try and set up WFH in a different area of your home to avoid impacting your sleep.
4. Keep your normal schedule! When we work in an office either salaried or hourly, we still typically have a schedule. Also, in the state of California, in an 8-hour work day, you are required by law to take two 10-minute breaks per day minimum as well as a 30-minute lunch period. Which also leads me to mention lunch should be for LUNCH. If you were in the office, I’d say the same thing, but especially since you are WFH: TAKE YOUR LUNCH AND YOUR BREAKS! These breaks and ending/starting work on time every day are important factors in maintaining adequate concentration and productivity and preventing burnout!
5. Socialize! Since the dawn of time, humans have gained social sustenance through work and daily routines! Checking in with your coworkers via zoom, or planning a retreat can be a great way to stay connected and build healthy relationships with the people you spend most of your time with! This helps decrease the negative impact of isolation and loneliness, builds positive feelings towards work as a result of caring about the people you work with, and making the most generous assumptions about their e-mails and texts, and helps you feel more comfortable reaching out when you need support.
6. Set boundaries with family and roommates! Let them know that regardless of working from home, you are technically at work, and that you MUST take breaks the way you would at work, and you cannot perform household tasks and duties until you have prioritized your breaks first. Setting this boundary clearly can help decrease miscommunication and frustration toward one another, and can help us decrease the guilt we feel as a result of the false notion that we should somehow be getting more done simply because we are working from home.
7. Don’t work on your vacations! I get it, if you only have so much vacation time, and it feels good to you to travel during your typical work schedule, go for it! Just make sure that when you take actual, paid, bonafide vacation, you are leaving all things work behind to the best of your abilities. If you are in a leadership position, have a surrogate step in for you while you are away or dedicate some time to making a flowchart for your staff for what to do before they reach the point of calling you. IF you MUST do some kind of work while on vacation, make sure to set aside a very small amount of time, keep a log of the time you had to take out of your vacation day and trip to figure out how to take that hour later at some point. Or at least you’ll know you shouldn’t hold on to guilt the next time you take a 30-minute break instead of 15.
8. If you need help, get help. Give myself or one of my colleagues a call to set up therapy sessions if you feel you’re experiencing burnout, unmanageable stress, anxiety, depression, or any other mental health symptom. We are here for you!

That’s it, folks. Remember your boundaries with space, time, and people. Be fair to yourself, and remember that working from home can be great, but you have to keep things balanced in order for it to pay off!