Hey there! Look, have you had social
isolation and working from home thrust
upon you suddenly? Well lots of people
have and with little preparation - and
it changes the rules about how we
achieve work-life balance when we're
stuck at home.
It's a dissolver of boundaries and that
means that we could easily lose that
balance. Well in this video I'm going to
show you how to maintain that balance. By
the end of this video you're gonna have
work that I know you can do that
reflects what the most successful
work-from-home people do, and hang around
to the end because I've got a free offer:
a high value tutorial that I would love
for you to take access of. Now my name's
Steve and I'm a professional coach and
trainer. I coach professional people like
you to combine personal brilliance with
mental clarity and unshakable emotional
wellness. For the best ideas and
practices in that theme then please
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when I worked in a senior managing
consultant role in a global fortune 50
corporation, I worked from home for
several years on a full-time basis. That
was because my team was spread all over
the world. The closest person to me was
150 miles away and I had teammates in
Bulgaria in Japan in Australia, so
working from home is something that
became very normal to me and I got used
to it, and I've conferred with a lot of
people who also got used to it and
that's what I'm going to be sharing in
this video. Now tip number one is to stop
trying to create a hard separation
between life and work. We used to see
life and work as completely
separate things, separated by a firewall,
and that firewall was generally
represented by going into the office and
leaving the office. Well it doesn't work
like that anymore. That separation
doesn't exist anymore. Even if you travel
to an office it still don't really exist.
People have expected
for quite a while that we will
be flexible about doing some work out of
the office, and indeed attending to some
personal business during office hours, so
the art of balance is to manage the mix
rather than to try and create hard
separation, and that's why some people
prefer to talk about work-life
integration rather than work-life
balance. Now tip number two is to decide
what your core working hours are and
stick to them as much as you practically
can. Now even though we're not talking
about a hard separation anymore a good
start to balance or integration is to
decide what your basic working hours are.
Now there'll be a degree of flexibility
around that but each day I want you to
decide when you're nominally at work so
when you sit down to work I want you to
actually write down when you're
finishing for the day. Make it at a time
that you actually write on a piece of
paper and I want you to work like you're
finishing at that time no matter what,
like you have to leave for a
hospital appointment or something, because
you have to leave because it's your
child's birthday party or something like
that and to work that way. You know
the famous film composer John Barry used
to have a rule of thumb that if he
hadn't got the music he was writing that
day down by three o'clock then going to
four o'clock probably wasn't going to
help. Now I'm sure that he worked late
under pressure and for some hard
deadlines sometimes, as we all do, but he
pretty much had his day down probably to
something like 7 a.m. through to 3 p.m.
and it sounds like he broadly stuck to
that. By the way I would love to know
what your number one key way of managing
your work-life balance or your work-life
integration if you prefer to think of it in
those terms. I'd love to know what that is.
If you're okay with sharing it then
please leave a comment. I read all the
comments and I'll reply to as many
comments as I can. Tip number three is to
create a specific office working space
because again even though we're talking
about balancing and integrating rather
than creating hard separation, it is
nevertheless healthy to create a space
that is specifically for work. You don't
want it spread out into your whole living
area, you want honor that space that you
created. It's still useful you see to
have that ritual of going into a work
space to enter work mode, if you want to
call it that, and leaving the work space
to exit work mode. Now you know the
famous author Roald Dahl? He used to have
a small outbuilding him his garden that
he'd take a flask of tea to
in the morning
and he would go into that room and he
was shut his door and that was his
working space. Now you probably don't
actually have an outbuilding in your
garden but I raised that to give an
example of how a famous person created a
specific working space in his home
environment. Now tip number four is to
keep that workspace organized. When I
start work in the morning I don't want
to have a long ritual of getting papers
out and laying them out and recreating my
physical space all over again, but at the
same time I hate leaving my work space
a mess with things sprawled out all
over it, so this is where you need to
figure out for yourself some easy and
fast way of getting your work space out
in the morning and putting your work
space away in the evening. Tip number
five is to spin home plates with work
plates. When I talk about spinning
place you know what I mean right? The
performer would go around and have a
steak and he'd put a plate on it, spin it
around, and then he'd go and spin another
plate, then he'd go spin another plate
and he would keep working around to make sure
that the plates don't fall off. That's the
metaphor that I'm invoking here. Now for
everything I've said about having some
nominal working times and working to
finish at the end of those working times,
and having a specific working space, we
do nevertheless have to embrace that
life and work no longer have these hard
separations between them and this is my
key tip to you, one of the best ways to
embrace that integration and balance
rather than hard separation is to take
short frequent breaks from your work and
do that to spin some plate in your
home life,
for example you've worked for an hour,
it's time for you to get up because you
should take regular frequent breaks, get
up and take a short break, and maybe exit
your working space, and put a lot of
washing in the washing machine, and
switch it on, and then come back and do a
bit more work, and then it's time for you
to take your next get up and move around
break, get up, leave the workspace go
and get the washing out. That kind of
thing. Now obviously you there are limits
to what you can do in these short get up
from work breaks, because they probably
only could be about five minutes or so,
but nevertheless you can mix doing your
domestic things with your work things by
moving between the two and keeping both
kinds of place spinning. And that works
the same way in reverse too. I mean when
you're nominally in your work hours it's
mostly work and spinning some domestic
stuff in the get up and move around
breaks in work. In the evenings when
you're normally more at home, but you
might need to check in email or you
might need to check on something, the
same applies, you do your home stuff and
then take small breaks to do the little
bits of work stuff. Now tip six is to
stay connected. This was something I
really learned when I work from home and
that is when you're socially isolated
that's not great for your clarity of
mind, it's not great for your thinking, we
really need the people around us and the
feedback we get from people around us to
really think clearly and get feedback on
what we're thinking about.
So use your telecommunications
technology! Don't think you have to have
a specific reason to have a conversation.
When you're in the office you simply
talk to people because they are around
you, and they gave you the feedback in an
informal way. You did not need a specific
reason to talk to somebody in the office
and you shouldn't need a specific reason
to talk to somebody over Skype or Zoom
or Microsoft, whatever tools you use with
your work colleagues, so stay connected!
If you'd like to talk more about
work-life integration and about how we
could create more result in that space
together I would certainly love to hear
from you. You'll find my contact details in the
pinned comment below this video, and
please don't forget to like the video if you did
like it, if you got something out of it,
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a free tutorial which I think will be of
great value to you. It's all about
mastering our composure in conflict,
pressure, stress in the moment,
uncertainty, fear, difficult circumstances,
about managing and mastering our
composure. Now please
you'll go into the pin comment below
this video you'll find a link to get
access to that free tutorial. I think
will be of high value to you. It's
absolutely free so please help yourself
and other than that I'll speak to you
again next week.