5. A Noise-Cancelling Headset Is Your Best Friend
Unless you live alone and have excellent neighbors, dealing with background voices and general noise when working from home can be frustrating. Investing in a high-quality headset or headphones with added noise-canceling features can be the ultimate solution that will save your sanity.
Nowadays, most headset models operate modern connectivity functions that allow you to connect to different audio sources. Whether you’re on your PC or phone, this can be vital for virtual meetings, video editing, and general online media consumption.
Plus, if multiple people are working from home, you don’t have to be an unwilling participant in their meeting but instead can go back to focusing on your work.
6. Maintain That Important Work-Life Balance
Without the physical separation of work and living environments, it can be hard to feel like you aren’t always in work mode. However, with mobility solutions and regular hours, you can set boundaries that let you feel at ease.
Here, avoid using your personal phone for conducting business. Instead, set up a phone number that you only use for calls with colleagues and clients. When you use a VoIP softphone, you can get a highly functional and robust replacement for all your work communication needs.
With a mobility solution, you can physically separate how you socialize and when you choose to do it. Whether you are working or taking a break at home, you can maintain a work-life balance.
It might sound counterintuitive, but working from your home office can potentially disrupt your work-life balance more than working in a traditional workplace. One powerful way to maintain and improve work-life balance is through self-time management.
Self-time management is the practice of carefully managing your time throughout your workday. Let’s explore some of the core compoenntis of time management with a focus on work-life balance:
- • Have a routine and stick to it: In a traditional workplace, your routineinvolves going to the office, working, then going home. These lines can become blurry when you work from home and have more freedom over your schedule. It’s important to still have a set time to clock in and clock out, even if you aren’t paid hourly. Leave your workday behind and enjoy your free time — don’t end up working too long because you aren’t changing locations.
- • Be aware of meetings:Meetings in a hybrid workplace are more necessary than before, but often tend to run longer than you might want. Long meetings can disrupt your work-life balance by running past your ‘clock out’ time or hindering your productivity, which encourages you to work longer. Schedule every meeting appropriately and stay aware of its duration.
- • Treat your home officelike any office: Not everyone will have this luxury, but if you do, don’t spend your leisure time in your home office. Make it part of your daily routine to physically leave your home workplace when it’s time to stop working.
Time management is a valuable tool for maintaining your work-life balance in an environment that’s new to most people. Keep the line between work and free time separate, even if you spend both in the same building.
7. Take Breaks to Exercise
Exercising is vital to maintaining good health and physical fitness for everyone. Working from home gives you the opportunity to take exercise breaks to improve your fitness and ward off staying sedentary throughout the day.
You don’t need to go to a gym to exercise and prevent having a sedentary day. Take a break every hour or two and do some light exercises. Some simple yet effective exercises to try are:
- • Squats
- • Pushups
- • Plank
- • Jumping jacks
- • Stretching
- • Short yoga sessions
Try to fit working out into your daily work routine; you can even add it to your to-do list. It might be challenging in the beginning, but as it becomes a standard part of your schedule, it’ll become as easy as hopping on a Zoom call.