But, for many, finding balance is elusive. It’s hard to maintain separation when the place that you work every day is also your home. So, how can you be better at it?

• Try starting your day as if you were going to the office. Leon from the Balsamiq team gets dressed every day, leaves his house, walks around his block twice, and then starts his workday. When he’s done he gets up, leaves his house, walks the opposite way around his block, and comes back inside. While that’s a bit extreme, there are other ways to “start your day, ” even just by doing something like getting dressed in attire you’d wear to your job.
• Think of it as work/life integration. For many, the idea of “balance” seems unattainable so focusing on the integration is important. For example, many remote employees have children and need to take long breaks throughout the day to go and pick them up or drop them off from school. What this means is that the day is broken into around four-hour chunks of working and personal life — it’s integrated and mixed together, rather than balanced.
• Put down the work chat on the weekends. If you can, do not look at or respond to work chat or emails on the weekends or any time you are on vacation. It can be hard and stressful to not monitor what’s happening, especially if you are in a higher-up position in the organization, but trust that your other teammates are capable of handling it, or would find another way to reach out to you if they weren’t. Vacation actually boosts productivity, according to Psychology Today, so don’t waste it!
• Meetup with other remote friends. It can be nice to cultivate a group of remote friends and meet up every once in a while to co-work at a coffee shop or someplace similar. This can help remote employees feel slightly more connected like they were co-located employees going out for drinks with colleagues. It’s also a good way to talk about some of the things that remote employees face with other people who “get it.”
• Find your routine. People who work in an office have a regular routine: they get up at the same time, commute to wherever they are going, probably get lunch at the same time, and commute back at the same time. Because remote work is very flexible, most remote employees don’t start off with that same level of scheduling. Set your routine up for yourself and stick with it. Then, your brain will start to associate certain times with work, and certain times with not-work to help you psychologically adapt from work/life balance.
• Don’t sign on the minute that you wake up. Many of us sleep with our phones right next to our beds. When you pick it up, don’t let work be the first thing that you look at. Wait a little bit of time before you start to see what’s going on in your company’s chat, or who has emailed you. Allow your brain to switch on and greet the day properly before moving automatically into working.
• Create a workspace. Create a place for yourself to work and allow that to be the only place that you work. Similarly, don’t do anything in that space beside work. It’s important to have a dedicated space for work, especially with your home technically being your office. Try to have the space be outside of your bedroom or where you generally do things for pleasure (like play video games, knit, or anything else). If you have a separate room you can use, that’s excellent, but otherwise, try to use a space in a less-often-used room to give yourself a little bit of a mental barrier.