Seven Tips On Working From Home (From Someone Who's Been Doing It A While)

I've been working out of the house for close to five years now but for many of you this is all brand new. So some basic tips I've learned over the years that might help with the adjustment.

1. Don't Be Afraid To Take Breaks. When you're working from home you often feel like you need to be working all the time. There are no natural breaks--no coworkers to stop and talk to and the things that you should be doing--going into the kitchen to eat lunch or have some coffee, taking a walk around the block--can feel like slacking off. But you need breaks and you should not feel badly about taking them--including short breaks just to stand up, stretch your legs, and walk around the house for a few minutes.
2. Schedule Your Day. How detailed you get really depends on your own preferences, but anything from "I'll work on X in the morning and Y in the afternoon" to "10:15-10:30AM: return emails, 10:30-10:45AM: review latest revisions..." can help make the day more manageable when there is no obvious flow to it. Just breaking everything into chunks can help too--if you get halfway through something before lunch, that can make you feel like you've accomplished something.
3. Check Your Schedule First Thing In the Morning. At the office you've got co-workers and assistants to remind you of meetings (e.g., "you want to grab a coffee before we jump on that 11:00 call?") At home, those meetings can pop up unexpectedly, especially if whoever sent out the invite has the sole alert set for five minutes before the meeting starts. So every morning first thing, check your calendar. (Pro Tip: You can share your calendar with Alexa and she can read you your schedule every morning.)
4. Set Up A Dedicated Work Area. It can be anything from a separate room to a piece of the kitchen table, but having someplace you know all your stuff is can be very helpful in getting focused. Your body quickly adjusts to "if I'm sitting here I'm working, not checking Facebook." That said, the advantage of working from home is that if you want to lay on the couch and answer emails for an hour, you can do that too and it can be a nice break from sitting or standing at your desk.
5. Call Someone Every Day. It doesn't have to be a client or a co-worker, it can be a friend or relative, but actually talking to someone rather than texting or Slacking or emailing is good for you, it lets you completely remove yourself from work for a bit and lets you maintain human contact, especially now when we're all staying home and not going to the gym or the coffee shop or even the supermarket.
6. Don't Be Afraid To Set Your Own Hours. This obviously depends on how time-sensitive your job is, but if you're working on something that no one else needs to see until tomorrow afternoon and your kids want to play a board game in the morning or you feel like taking a long run--go for it. Worst case is you'll do a few hours work after dinner or early the next morning but you might as well take advantage of the fact that you're not commuting anywhere and that no one will know when you actually wrote that report so long as you have it in their inboxes the next day.
7. Remember To Stop Working. When I first started working from home this was probably the toughest thing for me to remember: there was always something I could be doing, something that, I rationalized, would make my workload lighter the rest of the week, and the kids were doing homework anyway, so why not do a few hours of extra work after dinner. That quickly leads to burnout though, the feeling that you're basically working from the minute you wake up till the minute you go to sleep and it's not a healthy habit. Now I usually set a specific time or task in my head and decide that is the end of the workday. It's helped improve my sleep tremendously too, because there's separation and time to unwind before bed.