6 Tips for Smooth Transitions Between Work & Home
“Your life is a story of transition. You are always leaving one chapter behind while moving on to the next.”
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I recently had the pleasure of being interviewed for an article discussing the challenges of transitioning between work and home. As I prepped for the interview, I realized that I’ve never discussed transitions with you all before and that you would likely benefit from it. So, that is exactly what we’re going to chat about today.
We all play multiple roles in our life – mom, wife, employee, friend, volunteer, etc. And while there are definitely some upsides to playing multiple roles (learn more about that here), it also comes with a lot of challenges. One of them being transitioning between roles, particularly when it comes to transitioning between work and home. This has become even more difficult as more and more people have begun working remotely. That natural separation between work and home is no longer present, so we have to create it for ourselves. We have to intentionally transition well; and I have 6 tips for you today to help you do just that!
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1. Create a physical workspace
Now, I’ll be the first to admit that working from a café, park, or library is one of my favorite things to do. But if you’re working remotely it can be really helpful to create a physical workspace in your home. This is helpful for a few reasons. First, it triggers your brain to let you know that when you’re in this space, its time to work. And the opposite is true too – when you’re not in this space, it is not time to work. Ideally, this space would have a door that you can close at the end of the workday and walk away from it. This helps transition from work to home because you’re not constantly seeing your computer and stacks of papers every time you walk by the kitchen table. If you leave your work sitting out, it’s so tempting and easy to sit down to “just do a few minutes of work” which becomes a rabbit hole and pulls you away from other more important things, like playing with your kids, exercising, or dare I say relaxing.
Having a physical space is also helpful in communicating with your spouse and kids. When my daughter sees me sitting at my desk (which is upstairs in my bedroom), she knows that I am working and is slowly learning to respect that.
You might already have a home office, and if so that’s great – use it! But if you don’t have a designated office in your home, you can get creative. For example, when I first started working remotely, I quickly realized that I needed more separation between myself and my kids (our home office doesn’t have doors that shut and block out noise). So, I dug out a folding table and chair from our garage and set myself up in our bedroom – which has a door that locks! There are so many creative ideas out there for fitting a small office space into a home. I’ve even seen some that tuck a desk or table into a closet. Whatever it is, create a space that works for you and one that you can walk away from at the end of the day.
2. Turn off the notifications
Technology is great, until it isn’t. It’s truly a double-edged sword in that it allows us to stay connected, but also makes it where we’re always connected. Research has found that email alone can disrupt our workflow, blur the boundaries between work and home, and even lead to increased job tension and work-family conflict. Pile on the notifications that our devices so “helpfully” enable for social media, texts, calls, weather, and grocery pick-up and it becomes impossible to go five minutes without getting distracted. These notifications make it all to easy to get pulled back into work when you’re trying to play a board game with your kids.
The good news?
You have complete control over which notifications you allow into your life. Instead of automatically allowing your email to “ding” every time you receive a new message, decide whether that is necessary. Want a helpful hint? It’s probably not. Mute the notifications for that family text group. While it’s fun to receive adorable pictures of your nephew or hear about the latest trip your brother went on, you don’t need to know about it immediately. Instead, you can set aside time during your workday to check work messages and schedule some time outside of work to enjoy scrolling social media or sending cute gifs to your friends.
I encourage each of you to look at the notifications that you allow to interrupt your day and if they’re not entirely necessary, turn them off! It’s so much easier to transition from one role to another when you’re not constantly being interrupted by the other role. As a bonus, your productivity will likely increase too!
3. Stick to a schedule
One of the most challenging things about working remotely is the lack of structure. Unless your job requires that you clock-in and clock-out, your schedule is entirely up to you. This sounds great in theory, but it also makes it all too easy to allow work to bleed into the rest of your life and vice versa. Meaning that we aren’t transitioning well between our roles. The solution? Create your own schedule and stick to it!
Take a look at your day and define when you will spend time on work and when you will spend time on your other life roles. Essentially, set some office hours. This ensures that you actually transition from work to home at a healthy time each day instead of looking up and realizing that the day slipped away while you sat at your desk and stared at a screen. Research supports the notion of detaching from work each day. In fact, psychologically detaching from work during non-work times has been found to protect employees’ well-being and their work engagement.
This applies even if you are working at the office. It’s so easy to slip into working a few more hours on that big project or convincing ourselves that our coworkers or supervisors will judge us if we leave the office too early. Often, pulling these long work hours doesn’t actually pay off and you sacrifice quite a bit of time (your most valuable resource) that could’ve been spent with the people you love.
4. Create transition rituals
Another way to create smooth transitions between work and home is to create a transition ritual. By that, I mean engaging in some sort of activity that allows you to ease from one role to another instead of jumping straight into another role and giving yourself whiplash. Have you ever tried to jump from work mode straight into mom mode, while your brain is still thinking about work? It’s not pretty or fun. In my case, it often ends up with me feeling overwhelmed and not as present with my family as I’d like to be.
The commute from work is the perfect time to decompress, listen to some calming music, and ease yourself (or should I say mentally prepare yourself?) for an evening home with the kids. Obviously, if you’re working from home this becomes a bit more difficult. Since you don’t have a commute to naturally mark the transition from one role to another, you will need to create your own transition ritual. This could be a 15-minute walk around your neighborhood, sitting down to drink a hot cup of coffee, or reading a chapter from a book. It doesn’t matter what it is. The important thing is that you create a buffer between roles to allow yourself to prepare for the next role.
I should also note that these transition rituals can be used in the morning when you are transitioning between home and work, and also in the afternoons when you are transitioning between work and home.
5. Plan ahead
Another simple way to ensure we transition well from work to home is engaging in an end-of-day planning routine. I don’t know about you, but I often find myself at the end of the workday with several new tasks that have been added to my list or even some tasks that I didn’t quite get to that day. If left unchecked, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the number of things that I need to do and those tasks swim around in my head feeling bigger and more difficult than they actually are. Thankfully, there’s a simple solution to this problem – a brain dump.
Taking the time at the end of the work day to write out all the tasks that you need to do and then making a plan for how you’re going to tackle them tomorrow (or throughout the week) can prevent obsessive thoughts about those unfinished tasks, making it easier to detach from work and be fully present at home. Better yet, research has found that writing out specific to-do lists 5 minutes before bed can help us fall asleep faster which means you’ll be better rested and have more energy to do the things you love!
At the end of your workday, take a few minutes to jot down your outstanding tasks and make a plan for how you are going to tackle them. This will help you leave work at work and, when coupled with the transition ritual I just mentioned, can help you fully transition from work to home ready to be present where your feet are.
6. Remind yourself that what you’re doing right now is the most important thing
For many of us, the reason we have difficulty transitioning between work and home is due to work-family guilt. I know I experienced this a lot when everything locked down. I would be playing with my kids but feel guilty that I wasn’t making progress on my research. And yet, when it came time for me to work on that research, I would feel guilty about not being present with my kids. I did an entire podcast series on work-family guilt, and I highly encourage you to check it out if you’re struggling with this. One of the best tools I’ve found to help me reduce guilt and be fully present where I’m at is to remind myself that what I’m doing right now is the most important thing. And if I realize that it’s not, I shift gears and spend my precious resources of time, energy, and money on what is truly most important in that moment.
I encourage you to do the same. When that guilt starts to creep in, the lines are being blurred between work and home, and you’re tempted to check your work email on a Saturday afternoon while the kids play in the pool, remind yourself that listening to their giggles and enjoying a cold crisp lemonade is exactly where you’re supposed to be. Those emails can wait.
I pray that these tips I’ve shared today will help you to better transition between the many roles you play. It’s not always easy and you’ll never be perfect at it, but with practice you will get better. And transitioning smoothly between work and home will allow you to enjoy the various facets of your life, reduce the overwhelm, and enhance your sense of balance.
Have a beautiful, joy-filled week friends!
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