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Originally Posted On: Conquering work-life balance during remote work – Clariti

Millions of employees are working remotely owing to the pandemic. This remote work intertwines work and life entirely and blurs the lines of work-life balance. As the commute to work is eliminated, people started working sooner in the day. They are also less likely to stop working at a specific time since they do not have to worry about traffic or think about when they will arrive home to their family.

While more work hours may seem beneficial, excessive hours dedicated to remote work without proper work-life balance can lead to burnout. This article highlights how employees can take proactive steps to conquer work-life balance.

Set Up a Fixed Schedule

During remote work, your employer may not follow a rigid work schedule. But to ease out work stress that comes from working for long hours and maintain productivity, employees should set boundaries for themselves through fixed work hours and logging off at the end of the schedule. This will not only boost productivity, but it will also allow you to set up dedicated family time.

Design a Remote Work Space that Separates Life from Work

Create a dedicated space for your home office that improves focus and is free of distractions. Any area like the study room, family room, or corner of your living or bedroom can be your designated remote workspace. If space allows, invest in a suitable desk that can be used only for work and avoid going to the desk on weekends to split up your work and life mentally.

Never Check Work Emails from Your Bed

If you want to achieve the perfect work-life balance, leave work emails at your designated remote workspace. Since you are working from home, rethink if you require work emails and chats plugged into your personal phone. If you think there is no need for Outlook, Teams, Slack and several other work-related apps on your phone, toss it out the window immediately.

Businesses can help the workers strike a perfect balance between work and life by setting communication boundaries during weekdays and weekends. Employers can switch to Clariti that offers email chats, documents, to-do list all in one app to drive productivity through seamless communication. Even when using the Clariti app, make sure you treat your bed as a place to live and not a place to work.

Adopt Messaging 2.0 tools

As more and more of us increasingly continue to work remotely, Messaging 1.0 apps like Slack, Microsoft Teams, and clones based on chats & ‘channels’ fall woefully short in addressing work-life balance issues. Not only are these apps chat-focused, leaving you to use a smorgasbord of other apps for email, to-do etc., they also force users to constantly monitor the barrage of messages flooding the chat channels for fear of missing out. This saps productivity immensely and is a huge drain on work-life balance. Clariti introduces a new genre of Messaging 2.0 apps to transition users from a largely email-only world to one with email, chat, and calls, and much more. Right from its introduction Clariti supported multiple communication apps including email, chat, calls, documents and to dos, and automatically connected related communications in threads. Clariti went a step further and introduced TopicFolders on the Web that look and feel like Desktop Folders but do so much more. Unlike Desktop Folders that can only store files, TopicFolders hold emails, chats, documents, to-dos, and calls. Continue working with emails, chatting with coworkers, sharing documents and whatever else you do at work. Clariti works behind the scenes to keep all your work organized by topic in a TopicFolder. Automatically. Without the hassle.

Tools like Clariti makes for the perfect app for creating a perfect work-life balance. You get so much more done in such little time.

Take Regular Breaks

When you are working in the office, you would probably be taking coffee breaks or lunch breaks. But when you are working from home, you may often move from one task to another and forget to take a break. Remember to give yourself some time between deliverables and add breaks to your work schedule to help you feel refreshed and reconnected with the outside world.

Take Time Off

It is still essential to take time off to recharge yourself. Ensure to check out for a day or two and rest your brain as it can improve productivity once you resume work.

In Conclusion

Creating solid boundaries with yourself, your work, and your colleagues can help you ease into remote work and enjoy more moments of true work-life balance. Recognize when you’re overworking yourself and take short breaks throughout your day to reset. Finally, adopting new tools like Clariti that reimagines old ways of organizing but still introduces new paradigms of communication helps you achieve so much more in so in little time.