We often talk about needing to prevent work from interrupting our personal lives. It’s absolutely important, but for many work-from-home workers, limiting local distractions while working can be equally challenging.
For the past few years people have talked about work-life balance from the perspective of work interfering with personal lives. Being responsive to emails and calls 24/7, working long hours, hard deadlines. These are legitimate problems, and we need to continue to draw boundaries to ensure that work does not inappropriately encroach on our personal lives. Despite the title, this article isn’t meant to be dismissive of that very real problem (“forget” is used as, here’s something we never talk about).
But there’s a flip side less often talked about, our personal life interfering with our work (note especially our work, and not the company’s work). This particular issue has come to the forefront now that so many people work from home and the crisis of the pandemic is over. How do we draw a boundary so we can get work done?
Maybe you run your own business. You may just be on a career path that requires focus and dedication; you choose that path and are happy to do it, so long as you don’t get too distracted. Or maybe you have a demanding job whether or not you want it and need to focus. For whatever the reason, you have work that needs to be done and personal distractions (not desires or obligations, but distractions) can get in the way.
The problem can rear its head in various ways. Spouses and children see a parent at home and readily interrupt. A spouse asking you to remember to sign for a delivery that day is one thing but asking you to run out and do errands doing your day is another. Likewise, other parts of our lives, e.g. school, community groups, may think that because we work from home it’s easier for us to be available and provide some time during the day. Certainly, it may be closer (e.g., the school is only ten minutes from your house but forty-five minutes from your office in the city center), but that doesn’t mean the hour they’re asking you to supervise the bake sale is any easier to miss if you’re working from home.
The problem is people mistake proximity (or accessibility) for availability. In our offices we have signals, like setting working hours in our calendars and tools. Unfortunately, there may not be a shared calendar with these personal communities to see your working and off-work hours. Keep in mind, even when you use a calendar scheduling tool, you may not always keep it up to date with a last minute “I’m getting into the flow so I’m going to block off the next three hours.”
Start by deciding what your availability should be. If you have flexible hours, you may be ok with interruptions. Once you decide when you’re available, find a way to signal it. For your family, it may be as simple as telling them when you’re busy and shouldn’t be interrupted. For young children (or spouses with the memory of a young child) you could go further by having a sign you flip on the door, or an item displayed on the desk, for when you’re in a non-interruptible period of time.
For those outside physical access, have a clear process. When a request is made explain the process by which you can be available. For example, “I can staff the bake sale table or help in other ways, but I usually only have flexibility Tuesdays and Wednesdays after 2pm, and I need to plan at least a week in advance so I can block the time and make sure I’m not in the critical path when I’m away from my desk.” This approach lets you help out but also sets conditions and limitations in which your help is given so that you don’t become the last-minute go-to person just because you live closest.
Again, because there’s no shared calendar that goes across multiple organizations, you may need to be explicit and remind people a few times of your scheduling process. While some people use a public scheduler like Calendly that’s typically for meetings (sometimes only predefined types of meetings), and not necessarily for, “please drive here and supervise for an hour.” Maybe one day we’ll have some twenty-first century Emily Post process for sharing this information, like a public readme file about how to book time for in person events and what level of request is acceptable. Until then I recommend sharing this article with your community and having a process whereby requests are made not by proximity by more evenly and done so well in advance.
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