How To Use Your Senses To Improve Your Work From Home (WFH) Experience.
I was inspired to write this Post for Thoughts, as I found myself discussing this approach to working from home (WFH) throughout the pandemic and lockdowns with many different people. What I share here is shaped by the many conversations I have had about separating work and home life when working from home.
Many people continue to work from home either entirely or partially, and these insights remain highly relevant. It is easily overlooked how small changes in your day can go a long way to help you separate your work and personal life more. These small changes are focussed on using your senses to your advantage.
So read on, see what fits with you and how you could implement similar things for yourself:
Touch & Body
The body is immensely powerful in remembering routines; you can embrace this and use it to your benefit when working from home.
Change clothes! When starting work, change into work clothes. When you finish working, you start downtime or you-time or family-time. Change clothes into something comfy that you associate with relaxing or socialising. For example:
Wear work-suitable clothing: not a pyjama (for example). Work suitable clothes will help to increase your concentration levels much more than a pyjama.
Wear shoes when working. This will also help you to feel alert and provide a transition for later; when you take off your shoes, it supports the transition into a different moment of the day.
This way you avoid the dilemma that you (your body) start to associate your pyjamas with 'being awake' and 'feeling alert' that come with working, and you ensure you body continues to associate pyjamas with downtime and sleep.
Smell & Scent
Use scent and smell to separate times of the day and spaces in your house! For example, the smell a workplace has, can be an (unconscious) essential factor in the association with 'work-time'. The same goes for a bedroom or kitchen; they usually have a particular scent that may not be helpful to kickstart work. Using scents to help separate time and space can be very helpful, especially when you are working in a space that is also the bedroom or kitchen, for example:
Light a candle or spray a room spray in the home workspace 5 minutes before you start working. When you get back into the room, ready to work, your home office / bedroom / kitchen will smell very different. In particular, when working from a bedroom, this can help separate sleep-time from work time.
Or apply the situation above reversed; use a (calming) scent when you finish work: so it anchors you to relax and let go of work and kickstart the rest of the day.
If you would typically wear perfume, wear perfume now too! As this can be a part of the getting ready routine.
I have often found that people prefer one or the other: they prefer to use scent before starting work to give them that kickstart of the day, or they like using it at the end of the work to support the transition into the rest of their day. What works well for you?
Sight & Light
How can we use light and your sight to separate work and home life? One way of doing this is by ensuring it is bright during work hours:
Ensure a bright well-lid room during work hours, especially when (e.g. during winter) it gets dark at 4 or 5 pm. For example: if you work until 6pm, ensure you have the lamps on once it gets dark outside and you are still working this can help with keeping your focus.
After work: after you have finished work, dim the lights and get that warm yellow glow into the house. This will signal to your body that the evening is approaching and will change your energy and concentration levels. (This assumes you work in the daytime; a similar approach can be applied the other way around when you work evenings, e.g. ensure your room is dark when you are out of work to ensure you can unwind and sleep.)
What works for you?
What do you think of using your senses to support the transition from work-time and downtime? Some of these tips can be applied for video-sessions too: see the video therapy post which also touches on using different chairs or rooms for a counselling session by video.
Leave a comment down below about what works for you. And if you are struggling with finding the balance and finding what works for you when WFH, you can book a consultation with me here to explore this.
