Working Remotely

 Hopefully this will end up as a series of posts, I know lots of people have been writing about this since the advent of COVID-19, but I've been doing this for about 6 years running now, so hopefully I can offer some more insight and what works longer term.  I come from doing this as a programmer, so if you're in another industry and see something that may work differently for other areas please leave a comment.  I will also include what I feel is the obvious in order to make this a hopefully complete recommendation.

Have a separate space where you work

This is probably the most obvious and most stated piece of advice, but also likely the most important.  If you want any kind of "work-life balance" then you need to, well, separate work from life.  If you're working in the spaces where you do the rest of your life, it will be hard to stop working.  If that's your thing, hey, go for it, but after doing that a long time I can say there is a definite benefit to being able to finish work and leave that space behind for the rest of the day (whatever your day may be).  People working in office have an obvious separation, though work has been creeping more into life in that respect lately as well with on call, having to be available for production issues, your boss just feels like calling or texting for whatever reason.  I would highly recommend you still set definite boundaries in this area, i.e not taking work calls after hours when your not on call and addressing them the next time you are in "work hours".

Keep your work space separate

Don't do things in your work space like eat, sleep, play, whatever.  Keep that area for work.  It will be tempting to do these things (except maybe sleep, but I've done that too), but that makes for the slippery slope effect.  Strive for what astronauts do in space, "clean separation", keep your work shit in the work zone, everything else outside.

Keep your work area clean

Hopefully you did this when working "in the office", and you should continue to do this in your home office.  It will help keep you in "professional" mode, whatever that means for your job.  Take some of the time you save every day from eliminating your commute and use it to keep your office clean.

Get up and move

This is a tough one for me personally.   As a programmer I get "in the zone" and I can and do ignore everything until I finish what I'm working on, if that's 20 minutes or 6 hours.  Sitting for long periods is terrible for you physically and you need to keep yourself active.  I try to (work in progress, still) get in a short interval workout early in the morning (after my other rituals, coffee, stretching, etc).  Use some kind of timer, and DON'T IGNORE IT.  As soon it goes off, whatever you're going, GET UP.   If you condition yourself to ignoring your timer, you're not going to do what you need to, and you need to get out of the chair at least every 30 minutes.

And my timer just went off, so I'm going to end this post here and continue another day :)