How To Find A Balance Between Business & Living When You Work From Home

home office

When you’re someone that works from home, you’ll be more than aware that things can get a little bit hectic. You’re busy trying to run your business, run the home, look after the children, and enjoy some downtime too. It can all get a bit much. While working for yourself is always incredible, it can be really tough too. At least when you work for a company, you get to leave the office and head home for the evening or weekend. But when you work the home, you can only close the door – and even then it’s often too tempting to run back into the office to check on things or do something that you forgot about. So what do you do?

Well, it’s safe to say that you need to be able to find a balance. It’s important that you can keep the business side of things largely separate from the living side of things. And yes, we’re talking about the physicality of things; the decor. To do this, you’ll often find that many people will tell you to focus on building a productive home office that you can close the door on. However, when you’re only working on the office, you may be missing out on the ability to create the right kind of balance around the rest of the home too. Because this is often the secret. You need to make sure that the living space is just as ‘non-business’ as the business space is ‘non-living’. So let’s take a look at how.

Choose Your Location Wisely

First of all, you’re going to want to ensure that you’re able to choose the best location for your office. It should be somewhere that you can close the door on and forget about at the end of the day. Whether you plan to squeeze an office in or create a new space (as we’ll go into in point four), make sure that you aren’t going to be distracted when you work, or too tempted to go back into the office when ‘work’ is over.

Work With Storage Solutions

Next, you need to make sure that you’re able to stay organized. The best way to make sure that you can find that balance and stick to it, is productivity. And if your office is a mess, your productivity levels will be affected. So make sure that you work with the right storage ideas to organize your space.

Lock Your Tech Away

If you know that you’re someone who will be tempted to keep on working even when the day is over, you’re going to want to take an extra measure to stop yourself. By locking your tech away in the room at the end of the day (the beauty of that closed door idea), you will be both physically shutting the door or your day and doing the same mentally.

Opt To Build Off Site

Another idea that can help you to really master all three of the above, is to create your office outside of the house. With a garage home office or by converting outbuildings, you’ll technically feel like you’re ‘leaving for work’ in the mornings, and will be able to shut the door on the day a little easier too.

Make Sure The Rest Of The House Is Relaxing

When you’ve nailed the productivity and organization of the ‘business’ side of things, you then have to do the same with the ‘living’ side. And this is often what you forget to do. You ace the office, but then your mind stays focused on business when the day is over too. So now, you need to work on the rest of the house, ensure that it’s your perfect relaxation space, and that you can create the perfecting living area too.

Keep Your Bedroom A Work-Free Zone

These days, so many of us find it acceptable to do a little work in bed before we go to sleep. While this may work for some people, it’s a sure fire way to mess up your sleep pattern, keep your highly stressed, and stop you from separating your business and living parts of your life and home. So make sure that you keep your bedroom a work-free zone. Focus on keeping it sleep-centric with the right furniture and a relaxing atmosphere. When you focus on creating a calm, pretty, and relaxing bedroom, you’ll be ticking another section off for the ‘living’ side of things.

Create A Relaxation Space

But that’s not all. It’s also going to be important for you to be able to relax at all times when you’re at home and do what makes you happy. It’s not always just for bedtime. So, it’s often a good idea to have a few relaxation zones hidden around the house. Whether you have a beanbag in the hallway, a reading room, a Zen-like bathroom, or even a rose garden, these little spaces will go a long way towards helping you to keep calm and detached at home.

Don’t Talk Shop

As much as it’s okay to talk about your day with your children and your husband, when work is done, you’re definitely going to want to leave it there. Don’t spend the evening dwelling on your day or reflecting on the stresses that have just passed you by. Instead, you’ll want to make sure that you’re completely in the present with your family. Even when you work from home, when you can leave your work at work and really be in the moment with your family in the evenings, you’ll find that things are so much easier to balance.

Feel At Home In Your Home

And finally, you’ll definitely want to make sure that you can feel at home in your own home. It’s so important that your home doesn’t just feel like an extension of your office. You still need to be able to feel like your home is your sanctuary. So make sure that you love your interiors, that your home really serves your family, and that you’re comfortable. Because when your home is your safe haven, it doesn’t matter that you work here too, because it will always remain your home first and foremost.

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