When we talk about separating our professional lives personal , we don’t just mean splitting your time between two physical locations. For one thing, working from home can make this kind of separation difficult—especially for anyone working in a small or busy home. But even when the office is a 30-minute commute from the bedroom, your work life and home life can still impact each other.
It’s useful to believe work-life balance as two complementary states of mind. In one state, you'll easily cut out distractions and enter a cushty and productive flow. In the other, you can fully switch off to focus on family, friends, and personal projects, without the potential stresses and responsibilities of your job still rattling around inside your brain.
For some of us, separating our personal and professional lives is easier said than done Christena Nippert-Eng. a sociologist and professor at Indiana University, Bloomington in her study of the mental frameworks we use to relate the ideas of “home” and “work,” categorized workers as either “integrators” or “segmenters.” These two sorts of employees manage their time in several ways, leading to two very different work-life balances.
The integrator tends to:
1) Bring their work home with them
2) Send email during their downtime
3) Discuss work-related topics with their partners
4) Leave their inbox open in a browser tab
5) Work from a single device
The segmenter is more likely to:
o Set clear boundaries between the office and home
o Avoid looking at their inbox after a certain time of day
o Turn off notifications on work devices in the evening
o Set aside one part of the day for meetings and calls
o Use a separate work phone or laptop
There are benefits and drawbacks to both ways of working, and certain industries and organizations naturally lean one way or the other. In recent years, however, the consequences of an unhealthy work-life balance on our stress levels became more readily apparent.
The unexpected rise of remote working, accelerated by the covid 19 pandemic, has only made it harder to understand the way to separate our home life from our work life. We set up office space in bedrooms in an attempt to fit our professional lives inside our personal ones. Under these conditions, finding ways to manage our time effectively and achieve a satisfying work-life balance is challenging but important to our overall health.
