Before you even start, add some structure to your day or your week. Make sure that ‘home life’ and ‘work life’ can co-exist without one taking over the other. Adele in our admin team has this to say about her work from home routine:

“Start your day just like you would if you were going to a physical office. Use the time you would spend on commuting to get as much household chores etc completed. Set yourself a time to start work and stick to it. The biggest hurdle when working from home is the constant temptation to get household tasks done at the same time. This helps to mitigate that urge to go put a load of washing on!”

For me personally, what has really worked is to use ‘timeblocking’ to make sure that I schedule in all my work, home and social events/tasks effectively and nothing slips between the cracks. Each week, Jay and I sit down with our weekly planners to ‘block’ out time for that week. We plan how much time we will spend on each task. It could be a 3 hour time block of payroll, or a 2 hour timeblock of jiu jitsu class. No two days are the same, so using this method we can be fluid about when certain things get done. (We can totally see why Elon Musk does this too, as does Bill Gates and Cal Newport, author of Deep Work). One week, we might do gardening on a Saturday morning, but another week it could be a Monday afternoon. Timeblocking means we find time for everything. During a ‘timeblock’, we can focus on the task at hand, knowing that everything else will have its time.