Preventing Work From Invading Life

QUESTION

How do you handle or balance your work and home lives?

I work from home and run a computer repair business. Work comes at me all day and night long in email and phone calls. I just read “Deep Work” and I was wondering if you shut down at the end of the day or not and how.

In particular, how do you set this up on your devices and has it worked out for you?

—Andres

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ANSWER

Balancing work and home life is one of today’s biggest professional challenges, especially for those of us who work from home or manage our own businesses.

Our time, if we let it, can easily get sucked up by work, leaving us with little space to do anything else.

Back in design school, students would brag about pulling all-nighters to get their work done. Everyone talked about these nights as if they were a badge of honor—but all I saw were people pointing out that they were terrible at time management.

I never pulled an all-nighter. Instead, I developed approaches to my work that allowed me to get things done and enjoy my personal time.

Here are a few key methods I used, and continue to use, to balance my life:

Techniques

• Micro-Vacations: Having a hard stop for work at the beginning and end of the day is crucial. Many folks let work bleed into personal time, so much that personal time transforms into work time. Rather than wait for the weekend or vacations to relax, use what I call “Micro-Vacations”—small, daily periods of total personal time—to keep yourself from burning out.
   

• Designated Spaces: Our habitats often define our activities. The gym gets us ready to work out, a movie theater gets us primed to be swept up in a story, and so on. Set up a workspace at home that is just for work, and don’t use it for anything else. It doesn’t have to be grand either, if you work at the kitchen table with your laptop, simply use your laptop elsewhere when using it for personal reasons.

Technology

• Phone: Notifications are, in my view, pure poison to productivity. Since you can’t control when they're triggered, power over your time is given to outside influences. I have all email notifications permanently disabled. (Set times to check your email, and stick to it.) During the work day, only messages from my team and my wife are allowed through.
   

• Laptop: Be very careful with what you have open or running on your computer. If you leave your email inbox open, for example, you’re bound to be pulled away when you see a new email appear. Take the time to manage your digital desktop so that it doesn’t manage you instead. Close apps that you’re not immediately using.

Discipline and organization are clearly big aspects to keeping your work and life balanced. You don’t have to be ruthless, however. Baronfig has a four-day workweek, but there are many Fridays—when I have nothing else going on—that I give myself an hour alongside a cup of coffee to knock out a few emails.

The important thing is that you control your work, not the other way around.

—Joey Cofone

Creator of Baronfig
Author of The Laws of Creativity

*Learn more about the law of connection in chapter 3 of The Laws of Creativity.

Oftentimes this is all you need: a comfortable couch with a good book or a captivating movie or a loving partner or a snuggly pet or a sleeping child or simply a total moment of solitude and silence.