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Drawing the Line Between Work and Home

We all have heard the stories of people who routinely take work home from the office every night. You may be one of them. On the flip side of the coin are the people who bring home items to work.

Back in the days when working outside the home generally meant cranking widgets in a factory, neither bringing work home nor home to work was a possibility. The ability to do work only at the workplace meant that our full concentration was on our work. Same with home items. After all, you can’t operate a factory machine from your backyard any more than you can write a letter while operating a forklift.

However, thanks to the increases in technology and the accessibility created by home computers and cell phones, the lines between work and home are blurring. This bleeding of items between home and work can put a lot of stress on us; we know everything that may need to be done, and have the means to do them at any time, so why not?

This mixing of worlds can be detrimental. I find myself working many more hours when I work from home, or wishing myself at home where I can hear my backlogged projects calling me. All this leads to stress. And I, for one, do not need more stress in my life.

Here are three things I try to hang on to:

1. I don’t have to be available all the time. I have a cell phone, but I made it very clear it is for personal use only. I don’t give it to clients, and my office has it only for emergencies. I had to stand firm on that. Further, I don’t have to answer all the calls on my cell phone during work hours from family and friends.
2. I don’t take work home. If I take work home, I will either do it, or feel guilty for not doing it. So I avoid the issue.
3. I don’t take home to work. One of my coworkers has a file of stuff she carts back and forth to work everyday. The file is full of letters to be answered, papers to sort and other actions. Every day during lunch she will say, “I should work on my file….” but she never does. I get around this by making sure I do home items at home. If I don’t have enough time for everything, that is a clue to me that I have taken on too much.

By sticking to these three principles, I find that I am able to keep the boundaries between work and home intact.

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Photo by Gratuitous Pawn

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