Working from home is quite honestly the best way to juggle both your personal and professional lives. After all, you’re using your home as the hub for both, so it makes sense that you can cut out a lot of the coordination and timing awkwardness.
No need to commute, no need to spend an extra hour getting ready in the morning - you can just get up and get to work, and then still have a friend come round after 5pm without needing to rush home and tidy up.
But when your home is your workplace, a few other things can get a bit complicated. Here’s 3 to pay attention to.
Separating Personal and Professional Income
When you work from home, you make your own money. However, depending on the type of business you run (such as being self employed vs. operating as a registered company), it’s easy to chuck all of the money you’ve made into the same pot.
You can muddy the waters here, and make it hard to isolate assets and their value. Not only can this make bookkeeping more difficult, but it won’t make planning for the future any easier either.
Indeed, when the time comes to think about the future, you may find it very challenging to work out what you’ve made, what you’ve got for retirement, and the overall value of your estate.
Find yourself a solicitor to go through your records and returns. Check out a link like https://www.harpermacleod.co.uk/expertise/individuals-families/wills-trusts-estates/making-a-will-in-scotland/ to find out more about future planning, will drafting, and what could be at risk here.
When You’re on the Clock and When You’re Not
When you work from home, it’s tempting to let yourself always be on the clock. You’ve got a free schedule to use as you like, around the mainstay responsibilities you have to get to, and that means work can happen whenever!
But this is a very slippery slope. If work can happen whenever, then it’s going to happen whenever. Your weekends will be taken up. Your evenings will be swallowed by your workload. Even your early mornings will be interrupted, and you already got to bed late because you were working!
Taking Care of Your Basic Needs
Finally, let’s not forget that when you’re at work, you’re less likely to reach out for a snack or a glass of water. When you’re in the office proper, snacking at your desk might be a bit of a taboo - and a lot of workplaces have policies around the potential for water spillage.
This is all to say that there’s a bit of a precedent for ignoring your needs in the working world. And when you’re working from home - and if you’re always working - meals, hygiene, and rest can all be sidelined too.
When working from home, work/life balance tends to become a lot more positive. However, you need to be careful about key boundaries that need to be drawn.
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