How to Balance Working At Home With Living My Life

When you work in an office outside of your home, it can sometimes be relatively easy to keep your work life and your home life separate. After all, you have a built-in boundary of sorts. Your work life is located in your office, while your family life is back at home. But when working at home, it can be a much bigger challenge to draw the line between your career life and your family life. It takes discipline and effort to strike the perfect balance between work and home life. For a step by step plan about how to achieve a healthier work/life balance if you currently work at home (or would like to start), please read this article.

Difficulty: Challenging

Instructions

1. Set up an office space that is not located in your bedroom or your living room. Your bedroom and your living room (and family room and dining room and kitchen) need to be off limits where your work life is concerned. Even if you only have a tiny room that you can designate as your home office, it is worth your while to do so. Indeed, setting aside a specific room that is intended for work only is an absolutely essential first step in achieving a healthy work/life balance for home workers.

2. Once you have created this separate work space within your home, your second step is to adhere strictly to your plan of keeping your home life and work life separate. This means not blurring the lines between your work life and your home life. For example, don’t allow a pile of file folders from your work life to accumulate in your bedroom or your family room. Be as firm as possible with yourself about maintaining this separation.

3. Step three is to establish work hours for yourself, and then really stick to those hours. If you are a home worker who works certain hours for a company that employs telecommuters, stick with those hours. Similarly, if you are a freelancer (and/or if you are self-employed and/or if you run a home based business), decide in advance which hours you intend to work, and then try your hardest not to deviate from the work schedule you have set for yourself.

Tips & Warnings

• Whenever you are not working at home, close the door to your office space to indicate to yourself and everyone else in your family that your work day is over. If you leave the door to your home office open during the time that you have set aside for your family life, this could potentially be another way to blur the line between your work life and your home life, and you are striving not to blur that line.

[Susanh]

on 5/12/2009 It is a challenge to separate life and work when both occur in the home, but you've given some good guidelines for us! Thanks.