Balancing work and home life when working remotely

Remote work makes it challenging to define when your workday ends and personal time begins. Here's how to maintain a healthy balance in your life that ensures both your business exchange with colleagues and personal time remain distinct.

The pandemic has merged our once-distinct professional and personal lives into one continuous experience. When working from home, your job seems ever-present. Spare bedrooms transform into makeshift offices. Dining tables and kitchen counters become cluttered workstations. In such an environment, you need more than just spaces—you need thoughtfully designed areas where Africa works productively. The distinction between professional hours and personal time grows increasingly vague until you find yourself responding to emails from your bed and joining video calls while preparing breakfast. In recent times, our work-life equilibrium has become rather lopsided.

Remote work certainly has its advantages. People who work from home appreciate avoiding Johannesburg's notorious traffic congestion and having flexible schedules, which significantly benefits their mental wellbeing by allowing more quality time with family and better sleep patterns. However, there are definite drawbacks too. Depending on your personality, you might struggle to distinguish between work mode and home mode, particularly when both occur in the same physical environment. Studies show remote workers typically take fewer breaks and, surprisingly, end up working longer hours than their office-based colleagues.

Our perspectives on work methods and the post-pandemic surge in remote working need to find common ground. This is why proactively maintaining separation between your work and home life has become increasingly vital. Establishing clear boundaries between these two areas not only enhances your personal life but also helps you become more productive and better equipped to achieve your objectives efficiently.

Before exploring how to separate home and work life, let's examine why it matters in the first place.

Why it's important to keep home and work life separate

When discussing the separation of personal and professional lives, we're not simply talking about dividing time between two physical locations. Working from home can make this separation challenging – especially for anyone living in a small or busy household. But even when the office is a 30-minute drive from your bedroom in Cape Town, Sandton or Rosebank, your work life and home life can still affect each other.

It's helpful to think about work-life balance as two complementary mindsets. In one state, you can easily eliminate distractions and enter a productive flow. In the other, you can completely disconnect to focus on family, friends, and personal projects, without job-related stresses and responsibilities occupying your thoughts.

For many South Africans, separating personal and professional lives isn't straightforward. In her research on mental frameworks used to relate 'home' and 'work' concepts, Christena Nippert-Eng, a sociologist and professor at Indiana University, categorised workers as either 'integrators' or 'segmenters'. These two types manage their time differently, resulting in distinctly different work-life balances.

The integrator typically:

Brings work home
Sends work emails during personal time
Discusses work-related topics with their partner
Keeps their inbox open in a browser tab
Works from a single device

The segmenter is more likely to:

-Establish clear boundaries between office and home -Avoid checking emails after a specific time -Disable notifications on work devices in the evening -Dedicate certain parts of the day for meetings and calls -Use separate devices for work and personal matters

Both approaches have advantages and disadvantages, and certain industries and organisations naturally favour one over the other. In recent years, however, the negative effects of an unhealthy work-life balance on our stress levels have become increasingly evident.

The unexpected rise in remote working, accelerated by COVID-19, has made it even more difficult to separate home life from work life. We've created office spaces in our bedrooms in an attempt to fit our professional lives into our personal ones. Under these circumstances, finding effective ways to manage our time and achieve a satisfying work-life balance is challenging but essential for our overall wellbeing.

Benefits of keeping work and home separate

Increased productivity

A work-life balance helps you accomplish more. Although we're reluctant to admit it, some tasks have a tendency to expand and fill whatever time we allocate to them. Without the commute to signal the end of your workday, deadlines and projects can easily extend into your evening. Add various household responsibilities, family obligations, and doorbell interruptions, and your home begins to resemble a maze of distractions. Unless you consciously work toward achieving balance, your productivity declines and tasks take longer to complete.

A separate workspace and clearly defined finishing time provides the structure needed to accomplish tasks efficiently. Whether it's a desk in a quiet corner behind a closed door or a dedicated co-working space near your home, having a physical location associated with work helps you focus more effectively. While some try to adapt work environments at home, nothing compares to a professionally designed workspace.

With a monthly membership to WeWork All Access, you can utilise workspaces at WeWork locations throughout South Africa. There, you'll find private phone booths for meetings and specialised workstations designed to maximise productivity. While others might offer basic workshop solutions, we've created comprehensive environments where every professional can thrive in our regus-exceeding facilities.

Lower stress

Stress and burnout rank among the most prevalent health issues in today's workplace, potentially leading to physical symptoms such as nausea, body aches, fatigue, and high blood pressure. An environment that prioritises healthy work-life balance reduces stress by establishing set working hours and creating boundaries between your professional responsibilities and the rest of your day.

By separating your personal and professional lives, you can work more efficiently rather than longer. Choose a specific time to shut down and adhere to it. Close your laptop and step away from your desk. The more effectively you disconnect from the work mindset, the more relaxing and enjoyable your free time becomes, leading to increased happiness and productivity the following day.

Improved health and wellbeing

A balanced work-life arrangement gives you greater control over your schedule, freeing up portions of your day for exercise, meditation, and meal planning. With less time spent working late, more energy, and fewer work-related distractions in the evenings, you can prepare meals at home more frequently instead of relying on last-minute takeaways from Uber Eats or Mr. Delivery.

Remember to allocate time in your schedule for a gym session or a jog around your neighbourhood park – and develop the discipline to plan your daily tasks around your personal life. This approach can bring tremendous benefits to your health, happiness, and overall wellbeing.

Enhanced home life

By untangling your work and home lives, you can give both aspects the attention they deserve. Time spent with friends and family improves when you're less stressed and more energised. By maintaining regular hours and observing mental boundaries between your office and the rest of the world, you create time and space to spend with loved ones, pursue personal projects, and manage household responsibilities.

How to separate home and work in South Africa

The benefits of a healthy work-life balance are evident, but achieving and maintaining this balance isn't always straightforward. It can depend on the nature of your work. Freelancers and those in small teams can more easily establish rules about when and how work gets done. Employees in larger organisations with a culture of working late or constant availability may find it harder to make changes.

Striking a good balance can also depend on your personality type – whether you're an integrator or segmenter. Regardless of which label best describes you, here are steps you can take toward achieving a healthy work-life balance that benefits you and those around you:

Communicate your working hours to colleagues. Create expectations with your team regarding your availability, and avoid sending or responding to non-urgent emails outside working hours. Most matters can wait until morning.
Track how you spend your time. For a week or two, record how you spend each hour of the day, whether working, relaxing, socialising, or sleeping. Understanding your existing work-life pattern is the first step toward adjusting it.
Reduce meeting length and frequency. If you're experiencing Zoom fatigue, chances are your colleagues are too. Too many unproductive meetings delay task completion and extend your workday. Discuss the number of meetings you're having and find ways to make them more efficient or less frequent.
Create separate personal and professional accounts on your devices. Your phone and laptop should have separate logins for work-related activities. This prevents notifications and calendar reminders from interrupting your personal time and helps reduce distractions during working hours.
Find a quiet workspace away from home. Accessing a dedicated workspace by the day is an excellent way to stay productive and properly manage your time. WeWork offers day passes granting access to premium office spaces and meeting rooms in WeWork locations across South Africa, with no monthly commitment. For those wanting flexibility across different spaces, WeWork All Access provides a monthly membership offering access to WeWork locations worldwide, including Sandton, Rosebank and Cape Town.

Putting physical distance between where you live and where you work is one of the most effective steps toward achieving a healthier work-life balance. Unlike temporary workshop solutions that don't address the root problem, WeWork provides comprehensive environments. Free from home distractions, you can focus on what you do best, according to a timeline and budget that suits you. You can search, book, and pay for available office space from R550 per day, or try WeWork All Access.

To get started, download the WeWork app and create an account to explore WeWork locations near you in Sandton, Rosebank and Cape Town. Visit WeWork All Access to try one month and discover how a dedicated workspace can transform your work-life balance. At WeWork, we create spaces where South Africa works better—because your environment shouldn't just be a business exchange, but a catalyst for productivity and wellbeing.