4 ways to keep your sanity while working from home
If you’re working from home, you might think your flexible schedule is improving your life. But in many ways,
an all-access, all-the-time approach to work can be frustrating and exhausting.
“It makes things much tougher because there is no real assumed start time and end time,” says Richard Chance, a
workforce analyst in Los Angeles. “Most companies today are so fluid with their employee attendance that it’s practically impossible to mandate a regular schedule.”
But that doesn’t mean there can’t be some consistency. “Whether you work from home three days a week and come to the office two days a week, or are in the office every day, there should be an established pattern of when the workday begins and ends,” says Chance, who worked for the U.S. Department of Labor from 2002 to 2014.
Here are a few tips to help establish a consistent schedule, not only for your benefit but for the benefit of your co-workers as well:
1. Establish consistent hours: If you work three days a week from home and come into the office on Tuesday and Thursday, be consistent with your Tuesday and Thursday hours. Yes,
employees can contact each other online each day and can check in on projectbased scheduling programs, but there’s still something to be said for face-toface interaction — even if it’s masked interaction. If your co-workers know you’ll be at your desk on Tuesday at 10 a.m., then be there on Tuesdays at 10
a.m. If people know you’ll be sitting in your home office from 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. each day, stay consistent. If not, use your digital messaging to let others know you’re way from your desk.
2. Be consistent with your lunch hour: Where you eat your lunch doesn’t matter as much as when you eat your lunch. It’s important to take your midday break at approximately the same time each day, give or take 30 minutes. People will respect your lunch if they know you’re away from your desk between
12:30 and 1:30. And no, they won’t freak out if you extend your lunchtime timeframe every once in a while.
3. Keep at-home and in-office hours consistent: One of the drawbacks of working from home is the feeling that you’re constantly on the clock. For each time you crack open the laptop at 6 a.m. and accomplish a day’s worth of work by the time your co-workers are logging into their computers in the office, there are those nights when you remain in front of your computer until 9 p.m. because you want to finish that one last thing. And then there are those days you take a two
hour chunk off to take a nap. One of the biggest frustrations workplace dwellers have with their at-home counterparts is their random inaccessibility during business hours. It’s great you can stay up until midnight to finish a project but it’s not so great if you made yourself unavailable from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. when people are trying to grind it out at the office and are trying to contact you in an effort to solve a collective problem.
4. Stay in touch … kind of: Despite the fact that you may receive emails at 11:30 p.m. from your manager, who has the most brilliant ideas while watching an impromptu marathon of “Housewives,” you’re under no obligation to respond to those emails at 11:31. In fact, if you consistently send immediate responses to off-hour emails from your manager and co-workers, they’ll assume that you’re always available, including during the weekend and while you’re on vacation.