How to bring work home

Published: Oct 10, 2018 By Kevin Dickinson

After a day’s work, all you want to do is go home and relax—maybe play with your children or go out to catch up with friends—but your mind just won’t leave the office. You snap at your kids because you’re still fuming about that troublesome client, or you can’t focus on your friends because you keep thinking about that overdue project.

We hear you. Work consumes a significant part of the day, and it can be difficult to completely disengage. There’s always one more task to complete or issue left unresolved, and telling a meticulous person to just let it go is like telling a five-year-old not to pick at a scab. The impulse is far too great.

Need help leaving work at work? Consider the following tips.

Create An End-Of-Day Routine

Establish a system to wrap up the work day. Clean out your inbox, respond to instant messages, and straighten up your desk. Whatever it is you need to do to start the next day right, do it. When everything is done, say or do something that signifies you’re finished. Tell your coworkers goodbye, announce: “That’s a wrap,” or clear your hands over your desk like a blackjack dealer.

Stick to this routine every single day to make it habitual. This will tell your mind work is over and it can finally chill out.

Confine Work To Specific Times And Places

It can be tempting to bring your laptop home to try to get ahead for tomorrow. Resist the urge. By keeping your work at the office, you’ll train your brain to associate work with your desk and the rest of life with everywhere else.

Granted, you’ll sometimes need to take work home with you. To help your brain training stick, designate this work to an at-home office environment. Don’t take it to bed or sneak a peek at your email while out with friends and family.

Have a hard cutoff time for that work, too. Even if you’re working at home, give yourself at least two hours before bed to unwind. By then, you’re probably too tired to be productive anyway, so feel free to leave it until morning.

Stay Focused

A major reason we take projects home is those unfinished tasks lingering in the back of our minds. Prevent this by staying focused at work and using good time-management skills. Set goals, plan out your day, limit multitasking, have a clean workspace, and prioritize your work by importance.

Will you complete all of your duties every day? Nope. But you’ll end the day confident that you’ll complete what needs doing tomorrow, making those unfinished responsibilities far less daunting.

Develop Good Smartphone Habits

It’s a technological marvel that people can contact you anytime from anywhere in the world. However, the mores of our always-on, always-connected society suggest you’re required to respond immediately. This makes it more difficult to fully disconnect from work than ever before.

You’ll need good smartphone habits. Let people know you’ll get back to them tomorrow, and eventually they’ll learn to keep communication to business hours. If that doesn’t work, set up your email and text with automatic replies ,and activate them during your off hours. If that doesn’t work, consider just turning the thing off.

Have Someone To Talk To

Your social network doesn’t have to be vast, but it should be solid. Having friends or family you enjoy spending time with will keep your mind in the present moment, not the past. You should also have someone you can talk to about the day’s difficulties and successes. Such a person will help you mentally unpack the work day, so you don’t have to carry it around.

Stay Healthy

Exercising, eating well, and getting enough sleep are vital for keeping work at the office. A study out of the University of Central Florida showed employees who averaged more than 10,000 steps in a day were less likely to bring a bad day home with them.

The reason? People who are healthy are better able to self-regulate their emotions and manage their impulses. People who are sick or tired have difficulty doing both. Staying healthy physically is key to staying healthy mentally, and mental health is the best way to stay mindful on enjoying the present moment and not bringing your work home with you.

Richard Drury/Getty Images

“Do you take work home with you?” is a tricky question you may get during your next job interview. It’s a good idea to think through your answer in advance. Get insight into why this question comes up during interviews, as well as tips for how to respond.

Why Employers Want to Know Your View on Working at Home

Employers ask this question for a variety of reasons. They might want to know that you are organized and can do all of your work in the allotted time. They also might want to make sure you maintain a decent work-life balance (which many employers believe will ultimately make you a happier, and thus better, employee).

However, some employers really are looking for people who make work the center of their lives, and want to assess just how dedicated to the job you will be. Even employers who do not expect in-depth work on projects after business hours may want employees to frequently check email from home. For some roles, a certain amount of after-hours work is built in. For instance, a social media manager for a late-night TV show may have monitor online comments after business hours.

Answering this question, therefore, requires you to know a bit about the particular company and job.

How to Answer

Before you answer, think about the company culture.

If you know the employer values work-life balance or time management skills, you will want to emphasize your ability to complete your work during work hours so that you can focus on family or other activities after work.

If the company requires employees to put in lots of extra hours and emphasizes the need for dedication and passion in the workplace, you may want to stress your willingness to bring projects home in order to ensure high-quality work.

If you aren’t sure of what the employer is looking for, the safest way to answer is to emphasize your organizational skills while also saying that, when necessary, you will take work home with you. Try not to be negative about bringing work home, since that may be something that is common at the company. However you respond, do be honest.

This question also provides you an opportunity to think about whether or not the job is the right fit for you. Always remember, an interview is a two-way street. Just as the employer is finding out what you would be like as a worker, you’re discovering what it would like to work for the company. If the employer clearly wants to you take work home with you on a regular basis, but you value your free time, you may want to consider not taking the job. Instead, look for jobs at companies that value work-life balance.

Let’s face it: The traditional 9-to-5 work lifestyle is long gone.

For many of us, it’s not unusual to stay at the office until 7 or 8, or to burn the midnight oil working on a freelance gig, startup idea, or extra project to get ahead at work.

Even if your company promotes a healthy work-life balance, your workload may get out-of-control busy at some point and you’ll simply need to bring work home in the evenings or over the weekend. In fact, a recent study showed that 80% of Americans work after they leave the office. Now that your work truly can be accessed anywhere, at any time, it’s an entirely different way of working from what the norm was a decade ago.

This new reality of never truly being off the clock can send your stress levels off the charts if you let it. However, there are ways to make it less painful. It’s all about setting (and sticking to) boundaries so that when you do need to bring the work home, you can at least leave the stress back at the office.

Here are some tips for setting solid ground rules and promoting a healthy, low-stress mindset when you’re cranking on a project at home.

Create Some Space

Designate a workspace at home for those late nights. This can be anywhere you have access to a flat surface and adequate lighting that allows you to concentrate—a desk, your kitchen table, a reading chair, just not your bed! This helps your mind and body understand when you’re in working mode and allows you to more effectively transition to “home” mode when you’re done.

Know When to Call it a Day

Pick a non-negotiable time to put away all your work—and stick to it. For many people, 9 or 10 PM is a great cut off time to stow away all devices before bed. Whichever hour you settle on, it should allow you to transition into relaxation and get enough sleep so that you’re rested enough to be productive the next day. Before you go to sleep, carve out a short amount of time for yourself and read or watch a TV show to unwind and get your mind off the work and transition into relaxation.

Communicate, Communicate, Communicate

Just as you and the people you live with have discussed logistics like who’s in charge of sending the rent check each month, it’s crucial to sort out your need for working from home as well. How quiet do you need your living space to be? Can you handle, “Hey, did you do the laundry?” or “Can you believe what my boyfriend said!?” interruptions? Having good, open communication with your roommates, significant other, or family around your work needs is key. After all, not only do you want to get your work done, you also want to be sure you’re keeping your home a happy place.

Stay Focused on Work

In addition to your workload, you probably also have a to-do list that includes going grocery shopping, washing the dishes, and doing laundry. And it’s probably making you sweat just thinking about how you’ll manage to get everything done. My advice: Compartmentalize. Prioritize the urgent to-do (your work project), and let yourself off the hook with the others. Ask your roommate or spouse to take care of the dishes tonight in exchange for you doing double duty next week—or better yet, treat yourself to Thai takeout tonight (hey, you legitimately don’t have time to cook!). If the laundry really can’t wait another day, drop it off for wash, dry, and fold. This way, you can focus completely on work without letting other to-dos go undone and make you crazy.

Quit Multitasking

On a similar note, don’t try to fit in the fun stuff on an evening or weekend when you need to be working. If you’re trying to squeeze in writing a blog post during the commercial breaks of American Idol, chances are it won’t be that good, and you’ll end up spending more time on revising it later. Either commit to taking a break from work for some fun or getting everything done now so that you can enjoy yourself fully later.

Working after hours is one of those unfortunate facts of life, but you can create rituals and boundaries that enable you to do it in a healthy, productive way. Furthermore, establishing these boundaries will help you assert yourself anytime you’re being asked to do something you’re uncomfortable with—at work or elsewhere.

#1 bulletooth

Hi,
this is a dumb question from a not at all savvy computer guy, so my apologies.

I was given a work laptop which can simulate my office PC by simply logging onto home WiFi.
Although i keep my personal browsing and work browsing separate. would in any way shape or form my personal browsing habits become visible on work laptop once paired to my personal WiFi? .

BC AdBot (Login to Remove)

• BleepingComputer.com
• Register to remove ads

#2 Trikein

Could you give more detail on your setup? What “simulates your office PC”? Are you using a VPN? A remote desktop/Logmein? Roaming profile? If you don’t know how it works, just try to describe the process or the name of the program within bounds of privacy.

Also, are you asking if your work IT can see what webpages you are going to when using the laptop outside of work? Or are you concerned your work IT will be able to see traffic/activity from other computers on your home network?

#3 bulletooth

thanks for the reply.

It connects via standard microsoft sync using wifi.

Just inquiring on whether the workplace will then be able to see traffic/activity from other personal PCs/laptops once the work laptop establishes a connection to a personal network? . I mean not doing anything illegal or anything, but still want to keep personal browsing personal, and business machine professional.

#4 Trikein

I am not familiar with Microsoft Sync. This article gives some info, but Sync is too broad of a method to isolate if they can see your traffic or not. My guess is probably not. They might be able to see traffic coming from the work computer, but as long as you don’t have a VPN client or server, traffic from other devices on the network should be unseen.

If privacy is a main concern, I would suggest asking your work’s IT. Word it in such a way, such as family members playing games, so they don’t get suspicious. Or you could use a VPN client like OpenVPN or LogMeIn Hamachi to secure the traffic, that way they can’t see what it is even if they can see where it’s coming and going from. See here for more info on free VPNs.

Edited by Trikein, 17 December 2016 – 01:58 PM.

#5 sflatechguy

Sync only syncs up files on the PC with files on other, paired devices. It is often used when companies use folder redirection for things like the Documents folder. Changes made to files when the PC is off the company network are synced up when the PC is back on the company network.

Your employer may be able to view your browsing history on that PC, and if folder redirection is enabled, any files/folders that are synced. They won’t be able to see any traffic from other computes on your home network.

#6 steve87

Of course it depends on whether you trust the company to do the right thing. Odds are that they are not doing anything nefarious but anytime you connect an outside device to your network it then has access to other computers on that network the same as it would have access to other computers/printers at work. Theoretically only open shares would be visible but a malicious employer could exploit vulnerabilities on your network to gain access to browsing history on other computers in the network for example. This is highly unlikely and possibly illegal but is certainly doable.

#7 Kilroy

bulletooth , I’m reading this as you want to know if your work laptop connected to your home WiFi can know about other personal web traffic from other devices on the same network. The technical answer is yes it could see other wireless traffic on the network. However, this most likely should not be a worry as I doubt your work sniffs the network traffic for networks their computers connect.

We asked the designers from Sight Unseen’s 2016 American Design Hot List how their homes inspire their design practices.

Written by: Aaron Britt

Artwork by: Nicholas Calcott

George Nelson once called the ideal office “a daytime living room,” a place organized for productivity while still conferring the comforts of home. WHY recently asked some of the designers from Sight Unseen’s 2016 Hot List about the relationship between where they work and where they live. From living with prototypes of their designs to surrounding themselves at work with the stuff of home—food, plants, and pets carry the day—WHY takes a peek into how, for so many of them, the personal and the professional blur into one.

Alex Proba, photographed in her Brooklyn home, is the quintessential work-from-home designer. She devises quite a lot of her product, graphic, environmental, and furniture design in her living room.

Alex Proba of Studio Proba
I am pretty lucky that I get to work in my home studio as well as in other studios and offices. I split my time between the two about fifty-fifty.

I am a person that needs complete order and silence to be able to create, which is often impossible to control when I work in other people’s spaces. I’ve had to learn to let go of controlling spaces that aren’t mine. Therefore, I am even more precious and systematized in my own space.

My studio gets messy but just when I am actually creating. Once I am finished for the day I put everything back in order. It might be the German in me. Another very important thing to me is to be surrounded by plants because at the moment Studio Proba consists of just me. The plants make it feel like I have silent company.

Ana Kraš
I used to have a separate studio I would go to, and I really enjoyed that. I loved that I had to dress up and leave, but the studio space itself was not that spacious or inspiring.

So now I’ve got this beautiful large home/work space on the Bowery that is a way more generous studio than I had before. The challenge is that it’s all-in-one. I’ve still been trying to dress up and “go to work” even though I just stay in. It all comes down to whether I feel good in the space and I make it work. The dream is to have a separate studio that is large, beautiful, inspiring, and very close to home, but the reality is I live in New York.

Kelley Behun
I work from home, which is a great luxury, and at this point I would have a really hard time giving up the convenience that affords. That said, we have outgrown the room designated as “the office” and soon I will need to annex the kitchen or a bedroom.

Adam Charlap & Andre Herrero of Charlap Hyman Herrero
We work out of offices in Dumbo in New York and Los Angeles. We have furnished our New York office, a large white loft in a former cork factory, in a romantically domestic way. A long French 1950s dining table serves as our work surface, and shelves lining the walls hold our library of books, fabrics, and material samples. Our Los Angeles space is more like an office pulled out of the 48th floor of an international style glass building, inserted into a stucco room of a Spanish colonial house. We like to think of the two offices as opposing experiments in melding domestic intimacy with office vernacular.

Brendan Timmins
At home, I have a huge, ever-growing library of reference books, as well as furniture and objects by my favorite designers and artists. I also often live with my own new objects to see how they function in a real space, and how I can improve upon them.

Chelsea & James Minola of Grain
About a year ago, we moved into a new studio space in an industrial area on Bainbridge Island, Washington, after working for seven years from a home-based studio and garage shop. Working from home served us so well for so long, but we have a toddler now, and having the new separate space is a revelation for us. It is such a luxury to have two distinctly different spaces to live and work. The one link to home and work is food. We always pack homemade lunches and snacks to get us through the day.

Rafael de Cardenas of Architecture at Large
I work in my studio, and get my hominess at home.

Will Cooper of Ash NYC
I like a clean palette to walk into every day—whether it’s work or home. We are inundated with so much imagery on a daily basis and we design for so many different outlets that it helps to not be distracted by our surroundings. The hominess of our Brooklyn studio comes from the objects around us—tons and tons of books and magazines, interesting and inspiring vintage and contemporary furniture and art, and, most importantly, the people. A lot of the warmth and homey feeling comes from our amazing team.

A 2015 study conducted by telecommuting research firm Global Workplace Analytics found that 3.9 million American workers said they telecommuted at least half of the time in 2015. This figure represents an increase of over 100 percent from the 1.8 million U.S. employees that said the same in 2005. The percentage of employees who telecommute, either by working from home, or by working outside of the office (for example, by traveling to and from patients’ homes) continues to rise to this day. While working outside the office, may provide for greater productivity, and reduce employer costs, HIPAA compliance and working from home is not necessarily a good thing. If proper telecommuting privacy and security measures are not in place, HIPAA Privacy Rule and Security Rule violations may occur. The number of employees working from home now is expected to continue to rise.

Want more details on HIPAA and telecommuting? Sign up for our webinar to learn more!

HIPAA Compliance and Working from Home

HIPAA rules apply to covered entity employees whether work is performed at the office or at home, or at a patient’s home. HIPAA compliance and working from home do not fit hand in glove for one simple reason: Working at home (or at a patient’s house) can put patients’ protected health information (PHI) at risk, thus presenting HIPAA Privacy Rule concerns and HIPAA Security Rule concerns.

Fortunately, these concerns can be addressed systematically, by taking specific measures with respect to specific work from home guidelines and requirements.

Employers can, for example, take the following steps to ensure mobile device security:

• Encrypt home wireless router traffic.
• Change default passwords for wireless routers from the existing passwords.
• Encrypt, and password-protect, personal devices employees may use to access PHI.
  • Personal devices should be configured before allowing those devices can access the network. Covered entities can also specify what brands and versions of personal devices are permitted to access company data.
• Ensure all devices that access your network are properly configured (i.e., are encrypted, with password, firewall, and antivirus protection).
• Encrypt all PHI before it is transmitted.
• Require employee use of a VPN when employees remotely access the company Intranet.

Additional steps employers can take include:

• Develop policies and procedures prohibiting employees from allowing friends and family from using devices that contain PHI.
• Have employees sign a Confidentiality Agreement before they begin work.
• Create a B ring Your Own Device (BYOD) Agreement, with clear usage rules.
• Provide lockable file cabinets or safes for employees who store hard copy (paper) PHI in their home offices.
• Provide HIPAA-compliant shredders for remote workers so these workers can destroy paper PHI at their work location once the PHI is no longer needed.
• Develop and require adherence (through a sanctions policy) to a media sanitization policy.
• Ensure employees disconnect from the company network when their work is complete. This can be done by applying measures such as IT configuring timeouts.
• Maintain and periodically review logs of remote access activity.

Fines Caused By Working From Home/Telecommuting

Recent fines levied by the Department of Health and Human Services’ (DHHS) Office for Civil Rights, based on covered entities’ failure to properly manage telecommuter access to PHI and electronic PHI (ePH), dramatically illustrate this point .

In 2015, Cancer Care Group (CCG), an Indiana-based radiation oncology practice, found out that telecommuting, rather than saving money, can be brutal on the bottom line. That year, CCG agreed to settle with DHHS for $750,000 for potential HIPAA violations.

In 2012, CCG suffered a data breach. The facts of the breach would be considered almost as quaint, were they not so lethal. An employee who had been given permission to telecommute, lost their laptop and backup drive as a result of car theft. The laptop contained the PHI of over 50,000 patients.

OCR investigated this incident and determined that CCG failed to take a number of basic measures required under the HIPAA Security Rule. One such failure was the failure to conduct an enterprise-wide risk analysis when the breach first occurred. Such an analysis might have resulted in CCG having discovered stricter measures were needed to prevent the occurrence of threats caused by telecommuting. Put more simply, had CCG analyzed risk, it would have discovered it needed a policy for telecommuting employees that required these employees take physical and security measures to protect laptop devices.

OCR, indeed, discovered that Cancer Care Group had no written policy regarding the removal of hardware containing PHI into and out of its facilities.

This lack of a written policy constituted a clear violation of the HIPAA Security Rule.

One of the HIPAA Security Rule physical safeguards is the Device and Media Controls standard. Under this standard, covered entities are required to “Implement policies and procedures that govern the receipt and removal of hardware and electronic media that contain electronic protected health information, into and out of a facility, and the movement of these items within the facility.”

CCG group was not the only employer whose allowing employees to telecommute resulted in HIPAA violations. The respiratory medical group Lincare paid $240,000 to settle a data breach matter.

The facts of the Lincare Breach sound like something out of a bad HIPAA soap opera. A manager from Lincare had left behind approximately 300 patient records in her car, after deciding to leave her husband. Believe it or not, the manager was actually complying with (an unwritten) company policy, which simply required that such records, as well as procedure manuals, be securely stowed away in cards as a form of data backup.

The manager left behind her car and her husband. However, the husband continued to have access to the vehicle. The husband later contacted Lincare and OCR to report he had discovered the private records.

When the matter got to a hearing before an Administrative Law Judge (ALJ), the judge ruled in favor of OCR, finding that, as an organization, Lincare had failed to implement effective HIPAA compliance guidelines.

Telecommuting and Safeguarding of PHI

Organizations can follow some basic procedures to minimize the risk of PHI that is in transit or stored in a worker’s home, from becoming disclosed without authorization. The first and most basic of these procedures is:

• Developing rules for remote employees in security policies and procedures. To do this, covered entities should make a list of all employees, and indicate, for each employee, the level of information to which that employee has access.

Jupiter | Getty Images As a nurse, I don’t think we will ever be able to eliminate stress. I think a certain amount of stress is expected in our line of work. I mean, let’s get real. We’re in the business of saving, and improving the quality of lives here. Stress is just part of the game.
But, just like an athlete playing a ‘game’, we need to leave it all on the field. Yeah, it’s a loose analogy, but it goes a long way. Athletes leave it all on the field and we nurses should leave it all at work.

Bringing stress-related issues home with you just compounds the original problem(s). We have a tendency to take that high-octane paced environment and just keep on driving until we drive it on home. Then you’re ‘wired for sound’ for your significant other or family member. You end up being unpleasant and short-fused with persons who really have nothing to do with your stress. Yet, these are the people that usually have to figure out how to deal with it? So then your level of stress gets even higher since you have no solution.

The real solution started back at work; Don’t bring it home in the first place.

Yep, easier said than done.

I’ve been lucky in this category. Being married to a nurse helps alleviate many of the stresses. I can usually just say one or two words, and that’s enough to get an empathetic ear. Even with that empathy, my wife and I made an agreement many years ago, before we both started working as nurses. We agreed to ‘never bring it home’. No matter what ‘it’ was, never bring it home unless you plan on solving the problem at home.

If it’s something that needs discussed to evaluate, and potentially eliminate the problem, then by all means bring it home. Unfortunately most of the things we bring home cannot be solved at home. Heck they can barely be solved at work!

Save yourself a heap of additional stress and leave it at the doors of where you work. I’m not saying leaving it at work solves the problems. I’m not saying leaving it at work will eliminate or even decrease your level of stress. What I am saying is leaving it at work will prevent you from unloading it into your house.

Work is already stressful enough, do you really need your home to follow the same path?

I see my home as my ‘vacation’ away from work. It’s where I clear my head, maybe recap my day, maybe even chat about the good, the bad, and the ugly things that happened during work. But I never make it a burden.

The hardest part isn’t figuring out if you brought ‘it’ home. Trust me, we all do. The hardest part is figuring out how to stop doing it!

One thing is for sure, you’re over-all stress level will slowly decrease when you leave ‘it’ at work.

Quarantine means more people are working from home. If that’s new to you, just follow these tips, and you should do OK. Heck, you may even find that you like it.

I’m one of the roughly 5% of Americans who work full time from home. I’ve been doing it for 30 years now. If I could manage it with a 28.8K modem internet connection back in the day, you can do it today in the age of broadband.

IDG Special Report:
Navigating the Pandemic

• Business continuity: Coronavirus crisis puts CIOs’ plans to the test
• Coronavirus challenges remote networking
• A security guide for pandemic planning: 7 key steps
• 10 tips to set up your home office for videoconferencing
• How to survive and thrive while working from home
• WTH? OSS knows how to WFH IRL

Broadband: You need the internet to work successfully from home. The faster your connection, the better. If you live alone — or at least if you’re home alone during your normal working hours — and if your work is mostly text-based, a connection of just 5Mbps should be enough. But if it’s the coronavirus that’s keeping you at home and you have a partner who’s also working online and kids with little else to do than stream Netflix or Disney+, you’ll need more, at least a 25Mbps connection.

Videoconferencing: You’ll also need fast broadband if you’re going to be attending videoconferencing meetings with your co-workers. You should also, of course, install the app for whichever videoconferencing service your company has standardized on. It doesn’t have one? Almost all the videoconferencing services are offering free packages so you can give them a try. Personally, I like Zoom, even with its privacy concerns.

If you’ve never done videoconferencing before, check out this guide to videoconferencing so you can make the most of it and avoid foolish mistakes.

Instant messaging/real-time group chat: If your office has standardized around Slack or Microsoft Teams, clearly you’ll need one or the other at home. My preference is good old Internet Relay Chat (IRC) or the more modern Google Hangouts Chat. If you want to run your own open-source, cloud-based service, check out Mattermost.

Remote desktop: Do you need access to your office desktop because your laptop doesn’t cut it? It’s always best to have a business laptop that you can use in a pinch as a do-anything, ready-to-run work desktop. But if you don’t, check out such remote desktop programs as TeamViewer, SplashTop or Microsoft Remote Desktop (MRD). But forget about Apple Remote Desktop. It just doesn’t work well.

Windows: Don’t patch your Windows 10 computer unless you must. Windows 10’s patches are infamous for going wrong. It’s bad enough that your office IT staff has to cope with them. You really don’t want to try to troubleshoot them at home on your own. See “How to handle Windows 10 updates” for instructions on delaying non-critical updates.

Time management: Need to track your time? Check out Timely. It enables you to both schedule work jobs and track the time you actually spend on them. That said, the only way I can track what’s due when is with Google Calendar. The business calendar version is part of G Suite.

Project management: There are a lot of project management programs out there, but it’s hard to beat Basecamp. It’s full-featured and remarkably affordable: $99 a month, with unlimited users with no user fees or project limits.

For workflow management, you should check out Asana. But, fair warning, it’s so flexible that if you don’t set it up right from the get-go, you can end up with a messy spaghetti diagram. That’s not a tasty dish.

That’s the tech side. Here are some suggestions on how to keep your sanity based on my decades of doing this.

• Get out and walk. Staying on your prat all day long isn’t good for your health, physical or mental. I walk for half an hour twice a day.
• Keep regular business hours. There are two really common time problems with working from home. The first runs like this: “I’m at home, so I can watch TV, I can play World of Warcraft, I can … whoa, what time is it?” The other runs like this: “I’m at work, and I must work all the time. I must not slack off. I must … whoa, what time is it? “ If you work 9 to 5 at the office, try to work 9 to 5 at home.
• Stick to your diet. You’ve heard of the freshman 15? That’s the weight everyone is said to gain when they first go to college. There’s also the work-at-home 15. Snacks are so accessible, and no one is watching! Also, we all tend to eat more when we’re under stress, and boy, are we ever stressed out these days. Try to eat healthy when you snack. Instead of chips, try an apple. Instead of a soda, drink unsweetened tea, or even good old, hydrating water. Your scale (and your work clothes, which you’ll have to get back into eventually) will thank you.
• Dress for work. You’ll be tempted to wear your jammies to work or your most comfortable T-shirt and shorts. Don’t give in to this unless you habitually work in comfy clothes anyway. If you’ve always worked in business attire, sweatpants and flip-flops aren’t going to feel like work to you, so keep wearing your business clothes to get into the right frame of mind.
• Set up a dedicated area for work. It can be as little as a cordoned-off section of your kitchen table. But scattering work across your home leads to scattered thought.
• Make it clear to your family and roommates that when you’re at work, you’re at work, even when you’re at home. You’re not available — but you’re not inaccessibly locked down either. Set your limits, but still pay attention to the others at home. After all, you talk to other people at the office, right?
• Get a comfortable chair. Unless you use a standing desk, you’re going to be spending a lot of time in that chair. It’s worth spending some real money on a good one.
• Get a pet. I’m not kidding. Especially if you live alone, having a furry companion will make your life a lot more fun. Just make sure your new office space is pet-proof.
• Use your new home videoconferencing gear and IM software to talk to friends and family. I’m an introvert’s introvert, but I still talk to my people on a regular basis. They help keep me together, and your folks will do the same for you — and vice versa.
• Don’t obsess over the news or check Twitter or the like every five minutes. Strive not to give in to temptation. It won’t help any, and you’ll just make yourself more upset.

You may never love working at home. It’s great for me, but it’s NOT, in big capital letters, for everyone. Still, if you follow my advice, you’ll get good work done and come out on the other side with your wits still about you.

Good luck, my friends.

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols has been writing about technology and the business of technology since CP/M-80 was the cutting-edge PC operating system, 300bps was a fast Internet connection, WordStar was the state-of-the-art word processor, and we liked it!

Work is piled up on your desk, your boss is being extra demanding, you didn’t have time for a proper lunch, and you just can’t wait to get home and relax at the end of this long day.

After a commute spent rehashing all that went wrong, you walk through the door, see your roommate, your partner, your parents, or your kids, and explode. You want to feel relaxed and happy to be with them after leaving work. But, it feels like they can’t do anything right and they just don’t understand how difficult your day was.

It’s an all too familiar scenario for those who work in the public impact space, and according to a study conducted by the Anxiety and Depression Association of America, 79% of men and 61% of women report that work stress impacts their personal relationships.

Here are some things you can do to stop bringing your burnout home.

Recognize that you have different coping mechanisms

Everyone has a different way of coping with stress. Some people want physical activity, others need quiet relaxation, and some want to talk it all out. The key is understanding how you and your partner cope with stress so you can come to a compromise.

Beth Salcedo, Medical Director for the Ross Center for Anxiety and Related Disorders and President Elect of the Anxiety and Depression Association of America, suggests talking with your housemates about coping mechanisms prior to stressful situations.

“For example, one person could say ‘It would be helpful to me if you would give me some quiet time between the time I arrive home from work and when we sit down together’ or something similar,” says Salcedo. “Everyone has their own ways of managing stress, and we are all so different. Talking together about what restores, rejuvenates and relaxes one partner versus the other is extremely important but not always intuitive.”

Find someone else to talk to

When you are really burned out at work, you may be complaining about it more often than you realize. No matter how much you love your partner, roommate or family, listening to them complain all the time just isn’t good for relationships.

“The stressful situation bleeds from work life into home life and becomes both of their problems, both of their stressors, and then can really make home life toxic,” Salcedo said.

She suggests that partners and families talk about how to set limits. For example, the duo may agree to only talk about work for 30 minutes each day, or they may agree to keep work out of the conversations on weekends. The burned out person needs to accept their situation and either make a decision to change or start thinking about the positive things they experience at work. She suggests keeping a journal to write down what you like about your job.

Pro Tip: You can also find other people to talk to. Join a local or online support group for stress or anxiety or a peer networking group like a local chapter of the Young Nonprofit Professionals. Schedule weekly dinners with other friends or family members and talk to them. And of course you can also find a therapist.

Practice self care together

Try meeting up for a walk or hitting the gym together right after you finish your work day. Studies show that exercising with a partner can actually help improve the quality of your relationship. And exercising is known to improve your mood and can help you process the stressful day.

Salcedo suggests building self care into your relationships, which could include meditating together, eating healthy together, and getting enough sleep. Making sure to prioritize your friends, family, and relationships and spending time with them is vital, she said.

Stop working, or at least try to

Leaving work at the office and turning it off when you enter your front door is ideal. But, of course, in today’s world that is difficult and sometimes impossible for many of us to do. The reality is that there are times when you have to bring work home.

If you do have to bring work home, set up a time limit and make sure you discuss it with your partner, your roommate, or your family, Salcedo suggests. Maybe you work from 8:00 to 10:00 p.m. at night, after first spending some time with the family. As long as everyone agrees and understands what needs to be done it can help stave off fights.

There are other things you can do, too. Try to set similar rules and limits to your use of mobile devices so that you are not constantly checking your email during dinner hour. And, if it helps, find a separate space—a coffee shop, a library, even a home office—to finish up your work responsibilities.

Take care of yourself

Of course, you have to focus on your own self care first. Here on Idealist Careers we have written extensively about how to deal with your work stress and burnout. Check out “Recognizing Compassion Fatigue in the Helping Professions” and “When Self-Care Isn’t Enough: How to Take Control of Your Mental Health.” Your burnout could also mean it is time to look for a new job. Not sure, read “6 Signs it’s Time to Find a New Job.”

Did you enjoy this post? There’s plenty more where this came from! Subscribe here for updates.

About the Author | Samantha Fredrickson has worked in communications and nonprofit advocacy for more than a decade. She has spent much of her career advocating for the rights of vulnerable populations. She has degrees from the University of Nevada, Reno and New York Law School.

Now is the perfect time to find out how you can shine by playing to your strengths

Save to my profile

Lockdown has been a time to reassess the way we work. For many of us, pre-pandemic, our routine was to commute to the office five days a week. Now, after spending the past few months working remotely, we are questioning our work-life balance.

Do we want to go back to the workplace or do we prefer working from home? Are we more productive working remotely or do we thrive better in the office? Maybe we need a flexible approach that combines the two? Companies too are taking a fresh look into the ways we work, and finding ways to improve productivity and become better employers.

As face-to-face contact slowly resumes, there has never been a better time to reframe our working lives and bring our “best selves” to the job – wherever we are doing it.

Work crafting

The average person spends more than 90,000 hours at work during their lifetime – that’s a whopping one-third of your entire life. And a very long time to feel dissatisfied if your job has become a means to an end and something you dread every Sunday night. Shockingly, around 80% of employees have said they need to “shut off” just to get through their working days. But, in many cases, this doesn’t mean you have to hand in your notice and start over.

We are totally equipped to restructure our approach to work – mentally and practically. I call this process “work crafting”. In my new book, Exceptional, one of the topics I address is how to re-examine your signature strengths and bring them to your job. The best bit? Far from jeopardising your career, it will positively enhance it – and it will help your employer too.

Where to start?

We’ve been hardwired to focus on our weaknesses and limitations, trying to minimise or eradicate them. We’re used to critical feedback, not positive, especially at work. But resistance to recognising our best strengths comes at a cost – science has shown we can work long and hard on our deficiencies without making much real progress.

World-class athletes have the right idea: they create highlight reels of their finest moments and then study them, in order to perform that way more often and improve their performance. It works.

We too can create our personal highlight reels. It’s a simple process that involves creating a set of memories of times our signature strengths and gifts were in play – times we were doing the things we’re good at and which come naturally. These could include team-building, communication, research, strategy-making, even being a queen spelling bee or an ace at card games. Once you’ve captured your own list of memories, ask your friends, family and colleagues – the people you trust the most – to describe times when they’ve seen you make your peak contributions. It will be a game-changer to see how our best self is seen by others. Your highlight reel provides concrete evidence of how you shine, and can be used as proof in moments of self-doubt.

Learn to be playful

Bringing these core strengths to your job is a challenge that can be playful and rewarding. Take David Holmes, a flight attendant for America’s Southwest Airlines. David used to dread giving the pre-flight safety announcement. It became a draining experience that he rattled off on autopilot up to six times a day. Being ignored by passengers, most of whom switched off during these talks, made him feel like a robot.

So David decided to rescript the announcement using one of his signature strengths: his ability to have fun with people. He began his new act telling passengers: “We’re going to shake things up a bit. I need some audience participation or this won’t go well at all.” He got them to clap their hands and stomp their feet as he rapped the announcement.

By making it more fun, the passengers listened more and David felt he could bond with them. He was still saying all the things his job description required him to say, he was just saying them in his own, more playful way. The result? He felt more excitement and enthusiasm at work for the first time in years – which was infectious to everyone.

“Marcus felt more excitement and enthusiasm at work for the first time in years”