Our House Rules Because of Our 9 House Rules: How Ozarka Work From Home

Most people are challenged to maintain balance between the office and the home when our devices are around us all the time. This is especially hard when you work out of a home office. Ozarka is a husband-and-wife co-operation, so that's an extra strain on any sort of separation between work life and personal life. 

Going into this we were keenly aware of the pitfalls. An investor told us she is even leery of investing in husband and wife business partners because she's seen marriages fail when a husband and wife go into business together. But it can work (hello Banana Republic). From the beginning, we set up guidelines that work for us and add to our house rules all the time. Here are our house rules for our home office:

1. We impose a routine even if we don't need to. We get up at the same time every day. Have coffee while watching one round of the morning news, get showered, get dressed even if we don't plan on leaving the house that day. 

I didn't used to do this. I'm a morning person so I would dive into work still in my pyjamas. And when I looked up from my computer, it would be 1:00 in the afternoon and I'm still in my pyjamas. Not good. 

2. We have a morning stand up/intentions setting. Even though it is just the two of us, we have a meeting at the same time every morning to commit to everything we intend to get done that day individually. We check in with each other if we think we can reach those goals by the end of the day or if we need to take something off. These intentions include both professional tasks (I'm creating a framework for the new project) and domestic (I'm running three loads of laundry and yes I'll do a socks and towels load).

3. Every day at 3:00 p.m., we have an all hands meeting, even though it's just four hands. This is the meeting where we go over our longer term work load, check priorities, make adjustments, and check off completed items on project plans and to-do lists.

4. We have our own work spaces. This one took a long time to figure out. We have an office, but Michael has sort of taken it over with his chaos of stacks of papers, computer cables, binders, and all sort of essentials that just look like detritus to me. But he knows where everything in that room is. We fight over this room because he never gets it organized, although he finds it perfectly organized. Michael has a calm, logical, linear, rational mind. I'm more chaotic. I related when reading Michelle Obama's book where she said Barack needed his "hole" where creates a warren of chaos for himself where he can concentrate. I guess people call this a man cave.

Michael has a calm mind, and he is comfortable in a chaotic physical setting. I'm the opposite. My mind is more chaotic and I need a silent, minimalist physical space with surroundings absent of clutter and distractions. I don't even like windows when I'm working. So instead of trying to coexist in the same physical space, I've relinquished the office to Michael. He can have it as crazy as he wants. I'll probably never walk through the door of that space. In the meantime, this little den area in our house is converted to a work space for me.

5. Don't forget about ergonomics if you work from home. I've been enduring a whole long list of physical ailments that make me feel like I've just been in a minor car accident...every day. Turns out it's a cascading of problems resulting from being hunched over my laptop in all sorts of wrong positions. So after a bit of physical therapy and a good talking to about setting limits, we're careful to make sure we're sitting or standing by our computers in the correct position, which means looking at monitors at eye level with our laptop key boards set lower.

6. We set our own work day flow. Back to the calm/chaotic thing. My energy and productivity come in bursts. Some days I'm incredibly creative and productive. Some days I can't get into the zone or the flow at all. Michael works in a way that we have been taught to aspire to. He can get respectable amount of work done all day, every day. I have learned to stop comparing myself to him and value the contributions I make to this partnership, in my own way. I'm also trying (trying to try...) to pull out of the zone or the flow and take breaks. This is supposed to even out the way up and way downs. My brain likes to start early and sort of peters out around 4:00 pm. So that's when my work day stops. Michael's rhythm is different.

7. When our work day stops, it stops. We try to put our computers down and resist the urge to open them. We write things down and save them for our morning stand ups.

8. We debate and argue well. There is a temptation as a married couple to capitulate for the sake of maintaining a loving and affectionate manner of communication. This is dangerous. At times when Michael and I are debating and the debate is getting heated or escalating, he will have tendency to fall back and say, "Well, I trust your judgment." I've told him it is not his job to trust my judgment, it's his job to spar with me and defend his position so we can arrive at the best solution. In turn, when I get exasperated, I tend to cut him off or assume I know what he is about to say. He does not let me get away with that. We will also during a heavy discussion check in with each other: "Are we getting angry or are we ok? We're ok? Alright, let's keep arguing about this." Because our relationship is above all the most important thing, it's actually given us the strength to have some very intense and frustrating and exhausting discussions about the business with great outcomes on the other side.

9. Except for Skype calls with friends or family member, we do not take our laptops, phones, or any devices into the living room. This is the hardest thing to do! We have made it a rule that the laptops cannot come into the living room, but they are allowed at the dining table. If we feel the urge to turn them on when our workday is officially over, we have to go where the computers are. This is a recent regulation we're trying out. It's easier for Michael because he's never been attached to social media. It's harder for me, the one with the social media habit. But in doing this, it compartmentalized social media into the realm of work, and not something I can reflexively reach for. I've found that banning devices from the living room has freed me up to read more and longer, and go to bed earlier, or maybe stretch out on the yoga mat or do anything--anything--other than mindlessly scroll through a bunch of nothing.

Written from the dining table,

Beth Massa, Owner and Founder, Ozarka