For many it looks as if the possibility of remote working
may yet be around for some time yet, and for others it may become a more permanent fixture and some employers
look to move from the office into the home – but there are challenges to
overcome whilst working from home and separating your work life from your home
life certainly needs some balance, so how can you set up your new home office
with this in mind?
(Image from
blogs.lse.ac.uk)
Location has a huge impact – The
success of your home office may be heavily impacted by where you choose to set
it up. The recommendation often is to set up in a part of your home you may not
often frequent, this separates you from many of the distractions at home but
also helps to create a more physical divide between your work and home setup –
if you set your office up in your lounge you may be distracted into turning the
TV on, getting disrupted by family members or pets, or even find yourself not
changing rooms at the end of the work day, find somewhere a little different
and you’ll be able to keep a nice balance for as many aspects as possible.
Try and match your setup – You’ll never
be able to directly match your office environment but you can do whatever
possible to replicate it in some way. Whether this be from similar seating
position or equipment, to just making the working environment as similar as
possible – it could help get you in the frame of mind to work once you sit down
at the desk, and perhaps not make it feel so much like just sitting on your
computer at home.
Software can help to stay on track –
One of the bigger challenges to overcome whilst working remotely is staying on
task – it can be very easy to simply flick on the TV or swap over to Youtube
and lose a little bit of working time during the day, fortunately there are
lots of options here for your home office and many may be as simple as a little
bit of software. This is becoming increasingly important on our mobile devices
for remote workers, despite recent regulation changes to initiatives such as
Gamstop aimed at reducing online gaming options, many operators have found ways
to avoid this and The Best Casinos give a comprehensive list of
sites that allow access – if you often find yourself getting distracted by your
phone, you could be one to benefit from a short term software lock during work
hours.
There’s a lot of other things that can help you as you
remote work from your newly set up home office, such as setting a schedule to
keep your home and work life balance, through to making sure you have a
pre-work routine as you usually would during an normal office week – the
adjustment may take a little time to get used to, but with the proper set-up
it’ll feel like second nature in no time.
