When working from home for any length of time, there may be issues that crop up specifically due to this extension of work into your home life. Some of these issues may be more acute and prolonged stress, while another big potential issue is an increase of tension or conflict with family members, or your partner.
This tension and conflict happens for a number of reasons:
Proximity
Being at home for extended lengths of time simply puts you in close proximity to your family and partner more often, and when cooped up together, there are more opportunities for arguments to flare up. This may not even be over anything major. In many cases, small annoyances build up over time and morph into huge arguments. This can happen even if you have good, stable relationships with everyone at home.
Work stress
One of the problems many people face while working from home is dealing with work related stress. When you work from home, the work doesn’t just follow you home, it’s in your home already. When you get stressed over your deadlines or responsibilities, you’re getting stressed at home. You can’t leave work and go home to relax like you did previously.
Stress makes you emotionally unbalanced and may make you irritable and on edge. Over days and weeks, it can seriously affect your mood and disposition, making conflict with those around you more likely.
Even if you can’t avoid these conflicts, you can lessen the chance of them happening, and ensure they aren’t going to blow up into something much bigger.
Here are some things you can do:
- Dress for work and dress for home. Remember that you can’t leave home to go to work and leave work to go home. Instead, dressing for work and home allows you to mentally and physically go through a routine where you change your role and responsibilities from professional life to personal life. It may seem like a small thing, but small acts like this that you make routine can help to draw a clear line between your work and life. This will help in managing your stress as well.
- Set an official “off” time. This means having a time where you focus only on your home life, and leave the work for tomorrow. This may be difficult to do, but making it a habit will ensure you keep enough quality time for your family and relationships.
- Spend time with your family. This may seem like an obvious thing, but many people take it for granted that there family and partner are around them all the time. Being in proximity of someone isn’t the same thing as spending quality time with them. You still need to make an effort to bond, and maintain those relationships, otherwise they weaken and strain and you end up miscommunicating, and not understanding each other. Don’t take it for granted that being at home means you don’t have to put in any effort at home.
You can make sure you have dinner together, play video games together, talk about your day, help each other with hobbies.
At the end of the day, you have to make an effort to ensure you keep work and home life separate, and you have to put in the effort to maintain your relationships at home. By doing this, you can lessen your overall stress, and ensure there are less opportunities for misunderstanding and strife.
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