Member-only story
WFH PRO TIP
Designate “Sacred Hours”
Or working from home can be hell
Working from home can be hell. Not news. We’re in Month 11 of this nightmare, and we figured that out real fast. I have been working from home for well more than 15 years, and I have learned a lot about how to structure my day to make it all feel less, well, overwhelming. One of my must-dos is this: designate “sacred hours.”
One challenge that those who WFH often seem to have — and I had this challenge for a very long time — is they value all of the hours in a week the same way. Monday at 9am is the same as Sunday at 4pm, which is the same as Thursday at 8pm. What do I mean? When I work on a project and I’m in a groove, I can stay at my desk until all hours of the night. And I did that for a long time in the beginning of my freelance career.
So, clients would get emails from me at 11am, 6pm, 3am. They quickly learned that I worked around-the-clock. And so they came to expect that I would work late, work weekends, and work despite other personal commitments. My clients owned me. Perhaps you feel the same way now. Because you are tethered to your boss and co-workers via phone, text, email, Zoom, and Slack, there is simply no getting away from work.
On my desk, the weekends and the hours of 7pm-midnight are my “sacred hours.”…
