Homeoffice means that the office is in your own home, only a few steps away from your bed, and there may be no fixed working hours. If you don't set clear boundaries here, it's hard to switch off in your free time and you quickly suffer from stress. Self-leadership and good time management are the basic prerequisites for this.
Tips for managing spatial boundaries.:
- 🖥🪑 If possible, your private life and your workplace should be well separated. At the very least, you should have a desk reserved specifically for work. An extra room for the workday would be best. A (foldable) room divider can be a great addition if no extra room is available.
- 🛌❌ The bedroom should be off limits for work. Especially if you already have trouble sleeping.
- 📆📫 Separate personal and work calendars, phone and mail accounts.
Tips for managing temporal boundaries.:
- 🥗 Keep your break times - and don't work during your break. Lunch should not be taken at your desk.
- 🤸 In the home office, you often miss out on the conversations with colleagues that break up the workday. Therefore, take short breaks between your tasks, for example with a 🧘meditation or some 🤸stretching, to clear your head and loosen your muscles.
- 📅 Enter your favorite working hours in the Google Calendar. This way, everyone can see directly that you might not want to get any more appointments after 5 p.m., but might be available already at 8 a.m. instead. Set blockers for lunch and deep work so you don't miss them. This way you can also indirectly specify preferred meeting times (namely outside this period).
- ⏰ Set meetings for a 25 or 50 minute period, rather than 30 or 60 minutes. This gives us all the opportunity to take a breath between 2 meetings.
- 📊 Try to plan your day realistically and plan buffers. (for more informations see topic “time management”)
- 👋 Separate your working day from your free time. This works well with small rituals: Wishing colleagues a good end to the day. Clean up your desk at the end of the working day. Take a short walk before and after work to simulate the commute.
Here you find a great article on this topic from our own HelloBetter Blog. It’s in German but we’re going to give you an english translation as soon as possible!
By setting boundaries, we are trying to establish a reliable order and also to protect something - for example, our physical or mental health. The difficulty is that a boundary always involves at least two people: the person who sets it and the person who has to respect it. If either is not the case, it becomes problematic.
This article is about how to become aware of your boundaries and communicate them to maintain your mental health. You'll also learn how to deal with other people's reactions to them.