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As someone who is self-employed, I find the separation between work and my personal life gets messy. The time I set aside to work at home coincides with naptime for my toddler. Recently, when my toddler refused to nap one afternoon, I lamented the lack of progress on my “to-do” list for work. I realized this is one of the many pitfalls of working from home that have arisen since I started doing this two years ago. I have an office, but with two young kids I always seem to be catching up on work outside of normal business hours.
Whether you are self-employed or work for a company, the line between work and personal life is even blurrier than ever. You may have left work, but your smart phone is dinging because you are getting work emails, or an assignment is completed on your laptop after dinner while your children play or sit in front of the television. Work and personal life overlap thanks to modern technology that causes us to be tethered to our work life, even after we are “off the clock.”
And when you feel like you get very few breaks from work, even after you’ve gotten home, you can feel stressed out, burned out, depressed, angry, or anxious (fill in the blank based on your own experience). Even if this is not the main reason that a client has come to therapy with me, it’s often an issue that comes up that adds to one’s stress level and can exacerbate already existing mental health issues.
So whether you work for yourself or work for someone else it’s important to think about how to keep work and home separate. Otherwise you might feel like you are working all the time or getting so caught up in the day-to-day of your personal life that you hardly get any work done.
I decided to talk to Anne Kirby, who founded the co-working space The Candy Factory in downtown Lancaster, about some of these issues. I figured Anne would be a good person to ask because she started the co-working space (a place where folks pay a membership fee to have a place to work) after her own struggles with separating work and her personal life.
Many years ago, Anne started a marketing business in her home. She wasn’t networking with others and didn’t have a professional place to meet clients. She was distracted by her kids and responsibilities at home. “Working from home was holding my business back,” she says.
Fast forward to seven years ago, and The Candy Factory was born. Anne says she sees it help its members by providing them a designated space to work where everyone else is working, too. “You know you have to get up, get dressed and go to work in an office every day,” which helps provide structure for people. It also makes it clear that work happens at the co-working space and not at home. You can then decide to set boundaries once you get home, like “I will not open my laptop” or “I will not check my work email.”
Anne says this work/home boundary helped her business to thrive, but co-working also brought along with it other social-emotional benefits. “People are very isolated when they work from home. They may think they have connections with others because of social media, but they are lacking that human interaction.” She says she has seen many positive social aspects to co-working, like members encouraging each other and friendships developing. Even members who aren’t overly social like knowing they have other people around them during the day. Research shows that having a supportive community and positive relationships with others is a key piece to determine one’s happiness.
Whether you are employed by someone else or work for yourself, here are some tips to take back some control over the boundaries between your personal life and work:
1. Communicate your needs and wants to others. For example, if your co-workers or employees call you after hours wanting help with problems, you could tell them which issues are okay to call about (e.g. emergencies) and which issues can wait until you return to work. Let them know that your after-work time is important to spend with your family and that you don’t want to be disturbed unless it’s absolutely necessary.
2. Once you set a boundary, make sure you follow through. You may be assertive when asking for what you want or need from others, but then you need to make sure if others violate your boundaries that you bring it up to them. For example, an employee calls you for a non-emergency situation during your personal time. Instead of answering her question, politely remind her that she needs to wait until you get back to work.
3. Set up a structure for “work” and “personal” time. If you don’t have a clear schedule about when “work time” is and when it isn’t, now is the time to make one. This is especially important for people who are self-employed or who work from home. It is easy to justify doing chores around the house since you are home anyway, even though you should be working.