If you have been a teacher from 2020 to now, remote teaching is a considerable part of your job. While working from home is great, it can also make it impossible to balance life and work.

If you have been a teacher from 2020 to now, remote teaching is a considerable part of your job. While working from home is great, it can also make it impossible to balance life and work.

And to be on top of your game, you need some balance in your life. In this blog post, we will explore ways in which you can maintain a healthy work-life balance as a remote teacher.

Establish a working zone

If you work at the same spot where you eat dinner, watch TV, etc., setting boundaries for your work life will be hard. Instead, it would help if you dedicated a place for work and nothing else.

This zone should not entertain distractions that will hamper your productivity, but the caveat is that your work should be limited to that one spot in your home. So once you are away from that dedicated zone, you are no longer working but living your life.

Block time for work

The idea of time becomes very flexible when you work from home, simply because the norms of logging in and logging out feel far vaguer when your workplace is right next to where you sleep.

You should establish clear rules regarding time and block those necessary hours on your calendar app. But beyond those hours, you should be busy doing non-work related things. The rule is simple; what you block is when you work, and the rest is your time to live.

Communicate boundaries clearly

As a teacher, you likely are overloaded with work and often depend on your coworkers to help you with some of it and vice versa. However, it is your responsibility to communicate to your team about when communication is okay and when it is not.

You must clearly state what hours are appropriate for work-related communication to be sure that you will not be bothered beyond those hours. Of course, there will be some exceptions, but they should be rare.

Share your plan with stakeholders

While teaching from home, it is easy to fall into a silo and assume that others will "get" your plan. But in reality, you have to let important stakeholders know of your plan so that they can accommodate some factors to align with it.

In your case, the stakeholders will be other teachers, your seniors, and most importantly - your students. Share your plan with them and tell them what they can expect from you and your non-negotiables which should include your right to a healthy life outside work.

Take breaks and recharge

Do not romanticize sitting in the same spot and slogging it out for 8 hours. To establish balance, you need to take breaks to refresh and recharge.

Breaks can help you break the monotony and avoid burnout. You can use the Pomodoro technique to manage your breaks by customizing the timings to suit your classes. You can also use tools like Take a Five to give your mind time to wander.

Write and reflect on your day

Regular reflection makes it easier to understand where you are and if you are doing something in the short term that might negatively impact your work-life balance in the long term.

So maintain a journal on a note-taking app like Routine and write down how your day went and if there are things you would like to change to have a healthy work-life balance.

Conclusion

Balance is critical to all of us, and having the right practices in place can help make it much more manageable. Did we miss any practice that could help you achieve a better work-life balance as a remote teacher? Let us know on Twitter @RoutineHQ.

Thanks for reading.

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