The Challenge of Working From Home That No One Seems to Mention

Having a quiet workplace where you can concentrate is great, and the internet is flooded with articles offering advice on how to do that. That’s the easy part.

I find the hard part about working from home is the other side - how to ramp-down the work brain, and flip into our family brain once we take the five steps that has become our commute. It’s only been recently that I discovered how much of a challenge this is, even though I’ve been working primarily from home for four years now.

When I am in work-brain mode, I have a tendency to be ‘Go! Go! Go!’, and I’ve learned (the hard way) that this attitude is not conducive to interacting with family. When my brain is still in a super-productive mindset, and I’m thrust back into a normal home environment, I come across as short tempered, irritated, and annoyed. As you could guess, this can be a source of friction.

A few weeks ago, I started reflecting on what was going on. At the time, I couldn’t even articulate the problem in the way I did above – I just knew there was something going on between work and home that wasn’t quite right. I eventually came to realize that I was holding onto work-related anxiety – specifically around situations where I either didn’t feel productive that day, or didn’t get as much done as I’d hoped.

That was a major breakthrough for me, which led me to come up with the following process for dis-engaging from work prior to walking out of the office:

• Start winding down work related tasks 30 minutes prior to leaving the office. I had gotten into a habit of trying to remain as productive as possible up until the final minute, but oftentimes I still didn’t finish the task I was working on, and it made things a mess to pick up the next day. By starting to wind down early, that easily led to the next item…
• Note down what tasks to start on first thing the next day. This accomplishes two things – it allows for some closure for the day if I didn’t finish a task, and it gives me an easy spot to start from the next morning to spool up productivity.
• Don’t beat myself up for not getting to everything. The reality is that tasks I am involved in at the midpoint of my career are significantly more complex than they were at the start of my career. There are going to be days where it doesn’t seem like the productivity needle has moved much, but these larger tasks require a lot more groundwork than early-career tasks.

These are little things, but I find they make a big difference in offloading the mental burden and making the transition from work-brain to family/home brain.