If you’re working remotely, that can be awesome: getting dressed when you want to! No bosses breathing down your neck to check your screen! Breaking for your beverage of choice and snacks whenever you want them!

But, with greater freedom comes greater responsibility. Remote work blurs the line between the personal and professional, and in doing so can have disastrous consequences for our mental health if not kept in check.

Create a Boundary between Work & Life

Remote working loses the physical boundary of the office. Without a new boundary to replace it, your mental health could plummet. Here are 4 hacks for separating work and life while remote working.

🖥️ Establish a designated work station: whether it’s a desk, a designated sofa, or the kitchen table - make sure your at-home work set up is cleared and set up exclusively for working. Just because you have a laptop, doesn’t mean you need to travel around your home with it. Mimicking the setup of an office at home helps to designate a physical space that is just for work. A desk is best: you can outfit it with all your work stuff, and then leave the space when work is done.
🌂 Clearly “open & close” your work environment: Especially if you’d rather sit on the sofa or need to convert a home-space for work, make sure you “open” and “close” it as a work space before transitioning into home life. For example, maybe you set up a water bottle, move your pet’s bed next to you, and turn on a diffuser with essential oils. When your work is done, clean up and put away your work space until the next time.
🧘🏿‍♀️ Wedge in personal time between sleep and work: It can be tempting to simply grab your laptop off the bedside floor and start plugging away. Delineating your sleep time, your personal time, and your work time is vital for mental health. Try and keep your tech out of the bedroom, anyway: blue light wires our brains, but regardless if you change your phone’s physical settings you still maintain a mental connection to your device unless you consciously put it away. It’s not called “unplugging” for nothing. Try to wedge in some personal time after sleep and before work. Whether it’s simply a long, hot shower and a cup of coffee, a morning dog walk, exercise, or meditation - build in some time to clear your mind and set your energy for the day.
📪 Close your inbox… and your mind. When you’re done with work, close out. If you use the same laptop for personal and professional use, consider logging out of your work email, turning off notifications, and closing tabs and documents. Tidy your workspace and take some personal time to flush your mind of the day, e.g. physical movement or a great playlist can help move our thoughts, too. In this way, you establish rhythms to “punch in and punch out” while not actually at the office.