Take Control of Your Time: Avoid Burn-Out

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced us to adapt to how we live and work. This change has brought benefits and challenges for those who can work from home. One of the biggest challenges is maintaining a balance between work and personal time. With the boundaries between the two now blurred, we must adapt our time management practices to ensure we're not sacrificing our personal lives for work.

We often need to be constantly available, leading to meetings and commitments outside traditional work hours. This not only sacrifices our personal time but also lowers our productivity.

A study by Buffer found that while productivity increased while working from home, burnout rates also increased. To tackle this challenge, we must start managing our time with a calendar for both our work and personal commitments. We may need to block off time for personal commitments that we never had to worry about before. This forces us to remind ourselves that we need to turn the lights out in the office and be present at home.

We should also block our calendar with personal commitments - even if it's 'Relax' time or time with friends and family. This signals that we are unavailable, which gives anyone who wants to squeeze one more meeting in at the end of the day pause.

When blocking our calendar, we should keep a consistent schedule of work hours so that if someone needs to contact us during off hours, they know what they're getting into right away without guessing how available we are. Our work time and personal time should stay as separate as possible so that we don't end up constantly running from one thing to another, trying to juggle both at the same time, and eventually ending our days overwhelmed, stressed, and burnt out.

We can avoid the adverse effects of working remotely and from home by managing our time with a calendar, blocking off time for personal commitments, and keeping a consistent schedule of work hours.