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Working from home top tips - Setting boundaries and avoiding burnout

Establishing boundaries around your work life and home life can be challenging when working from home, but its important to take steps to separate the two and keep away unnecessary stress.

Here are eight top tips to avoid burnout while you are working from home, during and after the pandemic, that will make a positive impact on your working week.

1. Carve out ‘commute time’

The usual drive to work or time spent sitting on buses and trains may have been a time you dedicated to listening to music or daydreaming, but it was ‘me time’ you may be neglecting now. Instead of waking up and logging straight onto your laptop or emails on your phones, block out half an hour each morning and evening and reclaim that ‘me time’. Even if you just sit on your sofa and look out the window, you are regaining that usual time to focus on you and your wellbeing.

2. Make your workspace picture perfect

Working from the dining room table? Or even your sofa? It’s important to make our home office space one that is inviting and calm, and an enjoyable space to be focused in. Filling those spaces with a bunch of flowers or clippings from trees or flowers from around your garden or suburb can be economical and effective in making that space work well for you.

3. Get moving

With a much-reduced commute journey, often from our bedroom to the living room, it means we are moving far less. Try adding a morning walk, run or stretch into your routine, get outside or move around the house more, and attempt to do the same during lunch. It can be easy to watch the hours go by all to quick and realise you haven’t moved from your chair in 3 hours, but it’s not good for our bodies. Try focusing on moving more during the day, it’s a great way to energise our minds and body.

4. Take a day to recharge weekly

The best way to avoid burnout is switching off completely from work and focusing on something entirely different, at least one day a week. Plan a walk, a movie day, a day spent baking or cooking your favourite foods, just make sure you turnoff your computers and focus on something that will provide you enjoyment. 

5. Put your laptop out of sight in the evenings  

Do you find yourself working longer hours since you’ve started working from home? It can be easy to keep logged on for longer, but it’s important you set yourself boundaries. Try moving your laptop to a cupboard or draw or different room at the end of your working day. This will prevent you logging on throughout the evening and give you time to concentrate on your home life.

6. Set a work cute off time

Map out your day and set out a cut off time that you will work to and when that time comes, log off. Stay away from work emails and your work phone and switch off. Those emails will be there in the morning, but make sure to set a clear end of day finish time and stick to it.

7. Eat your food away from your desk space

Stay balanced by eating your snacks and lunch away from your home office space, it will provide a purposeful break and reinforce that work and home life are separate.

8. A good nights sleep 

Focus on a goods night sleep by creating good bedtime habits, these can include aiming to get to bed by 9:30 pm, reading before bed and not watching TV, turning off your phone an hour before sleep, taking a warm shower or drinking a warm drink. Find out what relaxes you and try to get eight hours of sleep, this will set you up for a new productive day tomorrow.

Your well-being is important to us. For further information and tools to support you during this period along with the latest COVID-19 information including Wesley Mission service updates, please view here.

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