DRY ERASE WALL QUOTES FOR AUGUST 2021 BY REMARKABLE WHITEBOARD PAINT

August: A Month of Warmth and Happiness

The name for the month of August comes from the Latin surname “Augustus,” meaning “consecrated” or “venerable.” According to the Gregorian calendar used in most parts of the world, August is the eighth month of the year. When August begins, and we race toward autumn, we feel a range of emotions from joy over childhood memories to nostalgia about more recent summers to enthusiasm about our plans for the upcoming seasons. Thoughts on August and the end of summertime often have a bittersweet quality. Below is a collection of quotes that reflect an array of ideas and emotions about August, offering inspiration to elevate your mood and kindle some happiness as you take pleasure in this time before fall begins. Post a quote or two on your Dry Erase Wall every day or once a week to help you and your loved ones in the home office or home school feel more motivated for your daily tasks.

The Love of August

1. “I love borders. August is the border between summer and autumn; it is the most beautiful month I know.”
– Tove Jansson (Finnish author, painter, and comic strip writer)

2. “August still stretched before us — long and golden and reassuring, like an endless period of delicious sleep.”
– Lauren Oliver (US author)

3. “Breathe the sweetness that hovers in August.”
– Denise Levertov (British-American poet)

4. “Everything good, everything magical happens between the months of June and August.”
– Jenny Han (US author)

5. “The seasons between spring and autumn, comprising in the Northern Hemisphere, the warmest months of the year: June, July, and August — the period of finest development, perfection, or beauty previous to any decline; the summer of life.”
– Cecelia Ahern (Irish novelist)

6. “The west coast of Corsica on a boat in August is probably as beautiful as it gets.”
– Antoine Arnault (French businessman)

7. “Take me to that island where people celebrate in the streets in August. Take me to Barbados.”
– Charmaine J. Forde (US writer and philanthropist)

Nature in August

8. “This morning, the sun endures past dawn. I realize that it is August: the summer’s last stand.”
– Sara Baume (Irish novelist), A Line Made by Walking

9. “August rain: The best of the summer gone, and the new fall not yet born. The odd uneven time.”
– Sylvia Plath

10. “Did you know that around the tenth of August, any year, you can look up in the sky at night and see dozens and dozens of shooting stars?”
– Elizabeth Enright (US writer), Then There Were Five

11. “August of another summer, and once again, I am drinking the sun, and the lilies again are spread across the water.”
– Mary Oliver (US poet)

12. “August is ripening grain in the fields. Vivid dahlias fling huge tousled blossoms through gardens and joe pye weed dusts the meadow purple.”
– Jean Hersey (US author)

13. “August was nearly over — the month of apples and falling stars, the last care-free month for the school children.”
– Victor Nekrasov (Russian writer)

14. “August is the month of the high-sailing hawks. The hen hawk is the most noticeable. He is a bird of leisure and seems always at his ease.”
– John Burroughs (US naturalist)

15. “It’s part of the American experience: We deal with mosquitoes in August.”
– Monica Hesse (US author)

16. “It was August, and the fields were high with corn.”
– Melanie Gideon (US author)

17. “Today is the first of August. It is hot, steamy, and wet. It is raining. I am tempted to write a poem.”
– Sylvia Plath (US poet)

18. “August is a great month in the garden, with many flowers, including dahlias, sunflowers and other hot-colored blooms at their peak.”
– BBC Gardeners’ World Magazine

19. “The brilliant poppy flaunts her head Amidst the ripening grain, And adds her voice to sell the song That August’s here again.”
– Helen Winslow (US editor and author)

20. “In August, the large masses of berries, which, when in flower, had attracted many wild bees, gradually assumed their bright velvety crimson hue, and by their weight again bent down and broke their tender limbs.”
– Henry David Thoreau (US naturalist, essayist, poet, and philosopher

21. “I love the little garden in the back of my family’s brownstone in Brooklyn. Digging out there in the dirt is a joy for me, although by the time August rolls around and my roses have black spot, I need the break winter provides.”
– Siri Hustvedt (US novelist)

Insights on August

22. “August brings into sharp focus and a furious boil everything I’ve been listening to in the late spring and summer.”
– Henry Rollins (US singer)

23. “There is something about August that feels bittersweet. Each sunrise comes a little later. Some nights are cooler. You realize this time of the year is ending, and you wish for just a little more time to savor the days of early morning light and the evenings of lingering dusk.”
– Julie Hage (US writer and blogger)

24. “Remember to be gentle with yourself and others. We are all children of chance, and none can say why some fields will blossom while others lay brown beneath the August sun.”
– Kent Nerburn (US author)

25. “August is that last flicker of fun and heat before everything fades, the final moments of fun before the freeze. In the winter, everything changes.”
– Rasmenia Massoud (US author)

26. “August creates as she slumbers, replete and satisfied.”
– Joseph Wood Krutch (US writer and naturalist)

27. “When summer opens, I see how fast it matures and fear it will be short; but after the heats of July and August, I am reconciled, like one who has had his swing, to the cool of autumn.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson (US essayist, philosopher, and poet)

28. “The month of August had turned into a griddle where the days just lay there and sizzled.”
– Sue Monk Kidd (US writer)

29. “Childhood is June, and old age is August, but here it is, July, and my life, this year, is July inside of July.”
– Rick Bass (US writer)

30. “That smell of freshly cut grass makes me think of Friday night football in high school. The cutting of the grass reminds me of the August practice.”
– Garth Brooks (US singer-songwriter)

31. “One evening in August, you have an errand outdoors, and all of a sudden, it’s pitch-black. It is still summer, but the summer is no longer alive.”
– Tove Jansson (Finnish author, painter, and comic strip writer)

32. “But I can see us lost in the memory, August slipped away into a moment in time.”
– Taylor Swift (US singer-songwriter), ‘August’

33. “In August, an inescapable blanket of heat settled over Paducah, the last gasping breath of summer roaring its weight out over the populace.”
– Kelsey Brickl (US linguist)

34. “The first week of August hangs at the very top of summer like the highest seat of a Ferris wheel when it pauses in its turning.”
– Natalie Babbitt (US writer of children’s books)

35. “Caught in the doldrums of August, we may have regretted the departing summer.”
– Denis Mackail (English novelist)

36. “Leaving any bookstore is hard, especially on a day in August, when the street outside burns and glares, and the books inside are cool and crisp to the touch.”
– Jane Smiley (US novelist)

37. “It is best to be born in April or August when the life-giving Sun is in its exaltation. For then we enter the sea of life on the crest-wave and are backed in the battle of existence by an abundant fund of vim and energy.”
– Max Heindel (Danish-American astrologer)

38. “August is a gentle reminder for not doing a single thing from your New Year resolution for seven months and not doing it for the next five.”
– Crestless Wave (aka Anjit Sharma – Indian writer)

39. “Everything good, everything magical happens between the months of June and August. Winters are simply a time to count the weeks until the next summer.
– Jenny Han (US writer)

Whiteboard Paint Reduces the Need for Electronic Devices

Whiteboard Paint Reduces the Need for Electronic Devices

Of the many environmental benefits of applying ReMarkable Dry Erase Paint, one of the greatest is that it reduces the use of electronic products such as tablets and laptops, which generate an enormous quantity of waste that has devastating effects on Earth’s environment. As the amount of e-waste dramatically increases year by year, solutions for its proper recycling have lagged far behind. Although it is essential to give e-waste items to a certified recycling company that meets strict requirements for handling these materials, many individuals and businesses fail to do so. Their old electronics end up in landfills, producing toxic results for our air, water, and soil. The main hazardous substances to be found in discarded electronic products are lead, mercury, cadmium, zinc, yttrium, chromium, beryllium, nickel, brominated flame retardants, antimony trioxide, halogenated flame retardants, tin, polyvinyl chloride (PVC), and phthalates. The presence of these and other toxins in our planet’s ecosystem can be greatly reduced through the use of whiteboard-painted walls in place of electronic devices.

Huge amounts of electronic scrap

poses a great risk both to the environment and to public health. Shortages in raw materials needed to make electronics have brought forth a new industry called “urban mining.”

The start of the 21st century has witnessed the generation of huge amounts of electronic scrap, whose careless recycling in both developed and developing nations poses a great risk both to the environment and to public health. As more people buy electronic gadgets, manufacturers are starting to experience shortages of the raw materials needed to make their products, so reclaiming and reusing the constituents of discarded e-products, called “urban mining,” makes good financial sense. A recent study conducted in China revealed that traditional mining of copper, gold, silver, and aluminum from ore is 13 times more costly than recovering these metals through the urban mining of electronic waste.

E-waste recycling involves taking old electronic devices apart

making it an expensive undertaking. Many companies illegally export e-waste to 3rd world nations where recycling is much cheaper but more destructive to the planet.

Proper or formal e-waste recycling typically involves taking old electronic devices apart, separating and categorizing their contents by material, and then cleaning them. Items are then mechanically shredded for further sorting through the use of advanced separation equipment. Companies that perform this service must adhere to strict health and safety guidelines and use pollution-control technologies that reduce the environmental and public health hazards of handling e-waste. All these procedures make formal recycling an expensive undertaking. As a result, many companies and countries illegally export their e-waste to developing nations where recycling methods are more cost-effective but also much more destructive to the planet.

In the unindustrialized nations where much of this illegal e-waste processing occurs, air pollution levels and concentrations of heavy metals are especially high around so-called “recycling plants,” as compared to other regions. These sites are typically backyard operations where impoverished local residents process the obsolete electronics by hand, separating them into parts to extract valuable metals such as gold, silver, and copper before disposing of the rest in landfills. Some metals and plastics are melted down, and those materials that can’t be feasibly processed accumulate in massive dumps near inhabited places and waterways. Sometimes, toxic fumes are inhaled directly as metals from the parts are burned in open bonfires.

Air-quality in e-scrap yards have highest levels of cancer-causing dioxins known

due to its e-waste industry. Dioxins are a group of chemically related compounds that are considered persistent environmental pollutants (POPs).

A typical site where these crude e-waste recycling methods are used is a cluster of villages in southeastern China known as the world’s largest dumping ground for electronic scrap from the United States. There local villagers remove solder from circuit boards over coal-fired grills, burn plastic casings from wires to extract the copper, silver, and mine gold by soaking computer chips in pools of hydrochloric acid. An air-quality study conducted in the area found that it had some of the highest levels of cancer-causing dioxins in the world due to its e-waste industry. Dioxins are a group of chemically related compounds that are considered persistent environmental pollutants (POPs).

Dioxins are found around the globe in local ecosystems, where they accumulate in the food chain, mainly in the fatty tissue of animals. These chemicals are highly toxic and can cause reproductive and developmental issues, damage the immune system, interfere with the action of hormones, and cause cancer. Due to their potentially lethal nature, prevention or reduction of human exposure is best accomplished through direct measures, such as strict control of e-waste recycling processes to reduce the production of dioxins. Another approach is the application of ReMARKable whiteboard painted walls in schools, offices, and other facilities to reduce the use of electronic devices, which are some of their main sources.

E-waste recycling is detrimental to the health of the workers

Chronic exposure to the pollution emitted from e-waste dumpsites causes high concentrations of heavy metals like lead, copper, zinc, nickel, barium, and chromium to be present in human blood.

For the above-mentioned reasons, the current global recycling system is detrimental to the health of the workers who improperly handle e-waste without protection from dangerous materials and is also a direct cause of contamination in the surrounding environment. Chronic exposure to the atmospheric pollution emitted from e-waste dumpsites causes high concentrations of heavy metals such as lead, copper, zinc, nickel, barium, and chromium to be present in human blood and may be related to hypertension, abnormally low levels of blood oxygen, and other conditions in people working in or living near the sites. The trigger for the air-polluting effect of e-waste is the fact that when the material is heated by overexposure to the sun, for instance, these metals along with other toxic chemicals are released into the atmosphere, causing one of e-waste’s most harmful effects.

Lead is found in almost all Electronic devices

which are becoming obsolete at an astounding rate. When lead is released into the environment near these dumpsites, it can damage the blood, kidneys, and nervous systems of people in the area.

Regarding lead, almost all electronics contain it, and today these devices are growing in number and becoming obsolete at an astounding rate. When discarded, some of our most advanced technological devices represent rapidly expanding and often unregulated exposure to this highly poisonous metal, which plagued even the ancient Romans. A University of Florida environmental scientist recently studied the ecological impact of the lead found in 12 different types of electronic items commonly discarded in landfills. In a report sponsored by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), he presented his finding that the items leached lead at concentrations above the EPA threshold for categorizing a type of waste as hazardous. When released into the environment near these dumpsites, lead can damage the blood, kidneys, and nervous systems of people in the area.

Arsenic is present in circuit boards, LCD displays, and computer chips

In large doses, arsenic is lethal along with being a known carcinogen, cited to trigger skin cancer, liver cancer, and other forms of the disease.

The air around e-waste dumps is also high in arsenic, various acids, and other potentially toxic chemicals, including mercury and brominated flame retardants. Concerning arsenic, the reckless disposal of e-waste constitutes one of the most common sources of the inorganic form of this poison. Arsenic is present in circuit boards, LCD displays, computer chips, and other electronic components, and as these parts accumulate in landfills, the arsenic present seeps into the surrounding land, affecting its soil chemistry and possibly the contents of groundwater as well. The presence of arsenic in groundwater and soil has varying effects on different organisms and may be harmful to both land and sea animals. In humans, ingesting arsenic in low doses causes irritation of the digestive system, and in large doses, it’s lethal. Arsenic is also a known carcinogen, being cited as a trigger for skin cancer, liver cancer, and other forms of the disease.

Health risks with chemicals from e-waste leaching into soil and groundwater also exist

The potential threat to groundwater quality is of special concern in those states that have yet to enact landfill-ban legislation to control such waste.

Another common method of e-waste disposal is to simply burn the unusable parts after sorting. Introducing arsenic into the atmosphere in this way also has serious implications for human and animal health. For example, research by the National Cancer Institute has shown a linear relationship between inhaling arsenic and the development of lung cancer, as well as a wide range of nervous disorders. Although many states in the US have enacted landfill bans for most consumer electronics and appliances, the dangers associated with the chemicals from e-waste leaching into soil and groundwater remain. The potential threat to groundwater quality is of special concern in those states that have yet to enact landfill-ban legislation to control such waste.

Considering the many harmful environmental consequences related to electronic waste disposal, choosing economical, long-lasting, and eco-friendly ReMARKable Whiteboard Paint is a sensible alternative for all types of applications since it minimizes the need for laptops, tablets, and other devices, providing a highly flexible medium for conveying information and ideas in offices, schools, and other settings.

Balancing Job Duties and Daily Life in the Work-from-Home Environment

Balancing Job Duties and Daily Life in the Work-from-Home Environment

Working from home can be a daunting experience, even for long-time telecommuters, and it often requires a period of adjustment to develop a productive daily routine. In the work-from-home setting, distractions invariably come up throughout the day, so balancing job duties, health, family, and personal interests can seem impossible, and the boundary line between work and personal life can easily become blurred.
In the current global environment, most people lack the time to make an easy transition to working from home and planning an organized home work schedule, with pressure from household duties being high and timelines to finish remote projects short. Many who work remotely also have to care for children or parents, creating a situation in which people are doing two jobs at once. This can lead to burnout if telecommuters don’t take the time to focus on their own needs and plan their lives efficiently.

With the work-from-home lifestyle becoming ever more common around the world, it’s important for remote team members to establish clear limits between work time and personal time. In this way, you can become more productive in job-related tasks and feel less stressed. If you fail to establish limits and systems that help you stay focused on what you need to do, you’ll not only be less productive but may also end up becoming overly fatigued in both your work and daily life.

Fortunately, there are specific steps you can take to create boundaries and thus help yourself be productive in both work and household tasks during this challenging time. The following are some practical suggestions to assist you along the way.

Shut the Door to Your Work Space

By far, the most challenging aspect of working from home is the lack of physical separation between domestic life and work life. When you go to a business office, you know it’s a place to work. When you operate from home, however, domestic and job duties inevitably run together unless you set up a designated office area and go there when it’s time to do work-related tasks.

A space with a door that you can close is ideal because when you close it, you can maintain some degree of separation from the people you live with; otherwise, if they have the chance to walk in and talk to you, give you a hug, or socialize, they will. On the other hand, when they see that the door is closed, it’s a cue that you’re working and need some time that’s free of distractions. It might even be helpful to put an “at work” sign on the door to make it perfectly clear you need to be left alone.

Incidentally, eliminating distractions also relates to the virtual domain, so it’s a good idea to turn off notifications from Twitter, Slack, and other messaging platforms.

Divide up Your Time

This step is important because it allows you to be more productive than you would otherwise be. In most cases, when people work from home, it’s hard to keep a strict 9-to-5 schedule, especially with homeschooling duties and other domestic challenges to deal with. More important is to create a plan about how you’ll go about accomplishing your schedule of tasks in the time you have available. And an ideal place to keep such a schedule is the large open canvas of a whiteboard painted wall. Here you can record all the activities you need to complete in a given day, week, or month, and easily change the entries when necessary by erasing and rewriting. The great size of a whiteboard wall allows you to mark all the activities on your schedule in large print, making them easier to see and interact with. Although, according to psychologists, large lettering is not necessarily an aid to memory, unusually shaped and hard-to-read lettering is, so you can use an odd writing style when putting items on your agenda to help you remember exactly what to do and when to do it. Recent studies have shown that people recall much more material in science, history, language, and other fields when they study it in a font that’s both unfamiliar and also hard to read.

You can divide your time into chunks that cover the entire day. For example, you might create a morning chunk when you can quietly do writing projects before other family members are awake then respond to emails and texts in the same chunk of time. In the afternoon, you can make a block for doing research or participating in meetings, with each task scheduled so that they don’t interfere with other activities.

Using this approach will also make it easy to prioritize the day’s projects. If a colleague wants to have a virtual meeting, you can just offer them a time during the next chunk of your schedule. And if an unexpected task comes up, it will either need to fit into the suitable block of time in your schedule, or it will have to wait.

Keep a Time Log

Open a new spreadsheet on your laptop or desktop and write the days of the week along the top. Include half-hour blocks from 5 a.m. to 4:30 a.m. along the left side, then record what you do every day in this time log: sleep, make breakfast, work, go out on errands, etc. Do this every week, 168 hours, then archive the log, open a new spreadsheet, and keep tracking your time usage with your log. If you continue doing this, the way you think about and use your time will undoubtedly change. In fact, knowing exactly how your hours are spent each day will help you become more efficient, and you may come to realize that even in a jam-packed life, there is still space for other activities. Knowing where your time is spent will allow you to reassign segments of time from mundane pursuits such as web surfing to meaningful activities such as reading literary classics or taking up a musical instrument.

Keeping a time log can help you realize that you have the chance to ramp up your involvement in personal interests. However, the most important outcome of maintaining a log can be a newfound sense of time’s abundance, the recognition that you have a full life and have time to do what’s necessary to make it even more meaningful. Gaining this sense of time’s abundance requires only a few minutes each day to keep your log up to date.

Plan When to Quit Working

Just as important as being deliberate about how you use your time is being deliberate about when to quit working. This means no more last-minute emails or text messages. Just stop. You’ll always have plenty of work to do, but if you don’t decide when to stop working, your life will become unbalanced. You’ll keep working and won’t have enough time for other tasks such as household chores that also need to be done. Quitting work doesn’t just happen on its own, and if you wait until you’re wrapped up in a major project to try and determine where to stop, most often you won’t, and you’ll find a reason to just keep working past your designated quitting time.

As an alternative, when planning your day, decide on an exact time to quit, and when you reach that point, stop, even if you have more work to do than you did when you started. Quit, and avoid thinking about work. Then the next morning, you can make a new plan to get the rest of the work done. Just be sure that your next plan also includes a time to quit, which you can write in large letters on your whiteboard wall to help you remember.

Dry Erase Wall Paint

Balancing Job Duties and Daily Life in the Work-from-Home Environment

Balancing Job Duties and Daily Life in the Work-from-Home Environment

Working from home can be a daunting experience, even for long-time telecommuters, and it often requires a period of adjustment to develop a productive daily routine. In the work-from-home setting, distractions invariably come up throughout the day, so balancing job duties, health, family, and personal interests can seem impossible, and the boundary line between work and personal life can easily become blurred.
In the current global environment, most people lack the time to make an easy transition to working from home and planning an organized home work schedule, with pressure from household duties being high and timelines to finish remote projects short. Many who work remotely also have to care for children or parents, creating a situation in which people are doing two jobs at once. This can lead to burnout if telecommuters don’t take the time to focus on their own needs and plan their lives efficiently.

With the work-from-home lifestyle becoming ever more common around the world, it’s important for remote team members to establish clear limits between work time and personal time. In this way, you can become more productive in job-related tasks and feel less stressed. If you fail to establish limits and systems that help you stay focused on what you need to do, you’ll not only be less productive but may also end up becoming overly fatigued in both your work and daily life.

Fortunately, there are specific steps you can take to create boundaries and thus help yourself be productive in both work and household tasks during this challenging time. The following are some practical suggestions to assist you along the way.

Shut the Door to Your Work Space

By far, the most challenging aspect of working from home is the lack of physical separation between domestic life and work life. When you go to a business office, you know it’s a place to work. When you operate from home, however, domestic and job duties inevitably run together unless you set up a designated office area and go there when it’s time to do work-related tasks.

A space with a door that you can close is ideal because when you close it, you can maintain some degree of separation from the people you live with; otherwise, if they have the chance to walk in and talk to you, give you a hug, or socialize, they will. On the other hand, when they see that the door is closed, it’s a cue that you’re working and need some time that’s free of distractions. It might even be helpful to put an “at work” sign on the door to make it perfectly clear you need to be left alone.

Incidentally, eliminating distractions also relates to the virtual domain, so it’s a good idea to turn off notifications from Twitter, Slack, and other messaging platforms.

Divide up Your Time

This step is important because it allows you to be more productive than you would otherwise be. In most cases, when people work from home, it’s hard to keep a strict 9-to-5 schedule, especially with homeschooling duties and other domestic challenges to deal with. More important is to create a plan about how you’ll go about accomplishing your schedule of tasks in the time you have available. And an ideal place to keep such a schedule is the large open canvas of a whiteboard painted wall. Here you can record all the activities you need to complete in a given day, week, or month, and easily change the entries when necessary by erasing and rewriting. The great size of a Whiteboard Wall allows you to mark all the activities on your schedule in large print, making them easier to see and interact with. Although, according to psychologists, large lettering is not necessarily an aid to memory, unusually shaped and hard-to-read lettering is, so you can use an odd writing style when putting items on your agenda to help you remember exactly what to do and when to do it. Recent studies have shown that people recall much more material in science, history, language, and other fields when they study it in a font that’s both unfamiliar and also hard to read.

You can divide your time into chunks that cover the entire day. For example, you might create a morning chunk when you can quietly do writing projects before other family members are awake then respond to emails and texts in the same chunk of time. In the afternoon, you can make a block for doing research or participating in meetings, with each task scheduled so that they don’t interfere with other activities.

Using this approach will also make it easy to prioritize the day’s projects. If a colleague wants to have a virtual meeting, you can just offer them a time during the next chunk of your schedule. And if an unexpected task comes up, it will either need to fit into the suitable block of time in your schedule, or it will have to wait.

Keep a Time Log

Open a new spreadsheet on your laptop or desktop and write the days of the week along the top. Include half-hour blocks from 5 a.m. to 4:30 a.m. along the left side, then record what you do every day in this time log: sleep, make breakfast, work, go out on errands, etc. Do this every week, 168 hours, then archive the log, open a new spreadsheet, and keep tracking your time usage with your log. If you continue doing this, the way you think about and use your time will undoubtedly change. In fact, knowing exactly how your hours are spent each day will help you become more efficient, and you may come to realize that even in a jam-packed life, there is still space for other activities. Knowing where your time is spent will allow you to reassign segments of time from mundane pursuits such as web surfing to meaningful activities such as reading literary classics or taking up a musical instrument.

Keeping a time log can help you realize that you have the chance to ramp up your involvement in personal interests. However, the most important outcome of maintaining a log can be a newfound sense of time’s abundance, the recognition that you have a full life and have time to do what’s necessary to make it even more meaningful. Gaining this sense of time’s abundance requires only a few minutes each day to keep your log up to date.

Plan When to Quit Working

Just as important as being deliberate about how you use your time is being deliberate about when to quit working. This means no more last-minute emails or text messages. Just stop. You’ll always have plenty of work to do, but if you don’t decide when to stop working, your life will become unbalanced. You’ll keep working and won’t have enough time for other tasks such as household chores that also need to be done. Quitting work doesn’t just happen on its own, and if you wait until you’re wrapped up in a major project to try and determine where to stop, most often you won’t, and you’ll find a reason to just keep working past your designated quitting time.

As an alternative, when planning your day, decide on an exact time to quit, and when you reach that point, stop, even if you have more work to do than you did when you started. Quit, and avoid thinking about work. Then the next morning, you can make a new plan to get the rest of the work done. Just be sure that your next plan also includes a time to quit, which you can write in large letters on your whiteboard wall to help you remember.

Balancing Job Duties and Daily Life in the Work-from-Home Environment

Balancing Job Duties and Daily Life in the Work-from-Home Environment

Working from home can be a daunting experience, even for long-time telecommuters, and it often requires a period of adjustment to develop a productive daily routine. In the work-from-home setting, distractions invariably come up throughout the day, so balancing job duties, health, family, and personal interests can seem impossible, and the boundary line between work and personal life can easily become blurred.
In the current global environment, most people lack the time to make an easy transition to working from home and planning an organized home work schedule, with pressure from household duties being high and timelines to finish remote projects short. Many who work remotely also have to care for children or parents, creating a situation in which people are doing two jobs at once. This can lead to burnout if telecommuters don’t take the time to focus on their own needs and plan their lives efficiently.

With the work-from-home lifestyle becoming ever more common around the world, it’s important for remote team members to establish clear limits between work time and personal time. In this way, you can become more productive in job-related tasks and feel less stressed. If you fail to establish limits and systems that help you stay focused on what you need to do, you’ll not only be less productive but may also end up becoming overly fatigued in both your work and daily life.

Fortunately, there are specific steps you can take to create boundaries and thus help yourself be productive in both work and household tasks during this challenging time. The following are some practical suggestions to assist you along the way.

Shut the Door to Your Work Space

By far, the most challenging aspect of working from home is the lack of physical separation between domestic life and work life. When you go to a business office, you know it’s a place to work. When you operate from home, however, domestic and job duties inevitably run together unless you set up a designated office area and go there when it’s time to do work-related tasks.

A space with a door that you can close is ideal because when you close it, you can maintain some degree of separation from the people you live with; otherwise, if they have the chance to walk in and talk to you, give you a hug, or socialize, they will. On the other hand, when they see that the door is closed, it’s a cue that you’re working and need some time that’s free of distractions. It might even be helpful to put an “at work” sign on the door to make it perfectly clear you need to be left alone.

Incidentally, eliminating distractions also relates to the virtual domain, so it’s a good idea to turn off notifications from Twitter, Slack, and other messaging platforms.

Divide up Your Time

This step is important because it allows you to be more productive than you would otherwise be. In most cases, when people work from home, it’s hard to keep a strict 9-to-5 schedule, especially with homeschooling duties and other domestic challenges to deal with. More important is to create a plan about how you’ll go about accomplishing your schedule of tasks in the time you have available. And an ideal place to keep such a schedule is the large open canvas of a whiteboard painted wall. Here you can record all the activities you need to complete in a given day, week, or month, and easily change the entries when necessary by erasing and rewriting. The great size of a whiteboard wall allows you to mark all the activities on your schedule in large print, making them easier to see and interact with. Although, according to psychologists, large lettering is not necessarily an aid to memory, unusually shaped and hard-to-read lettering is, so you can use an odd writing style when putting items on your agenda to help you remember exactly what to do and when to do it. Recent studies have shown that people recall much more material in science, history, language, and other fields when they study it in a font that’s both unfamiliar and also hard to read.

You can divide your time into chunks that cover the entire day. For example, you might create a morning chunk when you can quietly do writing projects before other family members are awake then respond to emails and texts in the same chunk of time. In the afternoon, you can make a block for doing research or participating in meetings, with each task scheduled so that they don’t interfere with other activities.

Using this approach will also make it easy to prioritize the day’s projects. If a colleague wants to have a virtual meeting, you can just offer them a time during the next chunk of your schedule. And if an unexpected task comes up, it will either need to fit into the suitable block of time in your schedule, or it will have to wait.

Keep a Time Log

Open a new spreadsheet on your laptop or desktop and write the days of the week along the top. Include half-hour blocks from 5 a.m. to 4:30 a.m. along the left side, then record what you do every day in this time log: sleep, make breakfast, work, go out on errands, etc. Do this every week, 168 hours, then archive the log, open a new spreadsheet, and keep tracking your time usage with your log. If you continue doing this, the way you think about and use your time will undoubtedly change. In fact, knowing exactly how your hours are spent each day will help you become more efficient, and you may come to realize that even in a jam-packed life, there is still space for other activities. Knowing where your time is spent will allow you to reassign segments of time from mundane pursuits such as web surfing to meaningful activities such as reading literary classics or taking up a musical instrument.

Keeping a time log can help you realize that you have the chance to ramp up your involvement in personal interests. However, the most important outcome of maintaining a log can be a newfound sense of time’s abundance, the recognition that you have a full life and have time to do what’s necessary to make it even more meaningful. Gaining this sense of time’s abundance requires only a few minutes each day to keep your log up to date.

Plan When to Quit Working

Just as important as being deliberate about how you use your time is being deliberate about when to quit working. This means no more last-minute emails or text messages. Just stop. You’ll always have plenty of work to do, but if you don’t decide when to stop working, your life will become unbalanced. You’ll keep working and won’t have enough time for other tasks such as household chores that also need to be done. Quitting work doesn’t just happen on its own, and if you wait until you’re wrapped up in a major project to try and determine where to stop, most often you won’t, and you’ll find a reason to just keep working past your designated quitting time.

As an alternative, when planning your day, decide on an exact time to quit, and when you reach that point, stop, even if you have more work to do than you did when you started. Quit, and avoid thinking about work. Then the next morning, you can make a new plan to get the rest of the work done. Just be sure that your next plan also includes a time to quit, which you can write in large letters on your whiteboard wall to help you remember.

Dry Erase Wall Paint

Balancing Job Duties and Daily Life in the Work-from-Home Environment

Balancing Job Duties and Daily Life in the Work-from-Home Environment

Working from home can be a daunting experience, even for long-time telecommuters, and it often requires a period of adjustment to develop a productive daily routine. In the work-from-home setting, distractions invariably come up throughout the day, so balancing job duties, health, family, and personal interests can seem impossible, and the boundary line between work and personal life can easily become blurred.
In the current global environment, most people lack the time to make an easy transition to working from home and planning an organized home work schedule, with pressure from household duties being high and timelines to finish remote projects short. Many who work remotely also have to care for children or parents, creating a situation in which people are doing two jobs at once. This can lead to burnout if telecommuters don’t take the time to focus on their own needs and plan their lives efficiently.

With the work-from-home lifestyle becoming ever more common around the world, it’s important for remote team members to establish clear limits between work time and personal time. In this way, you can become more productive in job-related tasks and feel less stressed. If you fail to establish limits and systems that help you stay focused on what you need to do, you’ll not only be less productive but may also end up becoming overly fatigued in both your work and daily life.

Fortunately, there are specific steps you can take to create boundaries and thus help yourself be productive in both work and household tasks during this challenging time. The following are some practical suggestions to assist you along the way.

Shut the Door to Your Work Space

By far, the most challenging aspect of working from home is the lack of physical separation between domestic life and work life. When you go to a business office, you know it’s a place to work. When you operate from home, however, domestic and job duties inevitably run together unless you set up a designated office area and go there when it’s time to do work-related tasks.

A space with a door that you can close is ideal because when you close it, you can maintain some degree of separation from the people you live with; otherwise, if they have the chance to walk in and talk to you, give you a hug, or socialize, they will. On the other hand, when they see that the door is closed, it’s a cue that you’re working and need some time that’s free of distractions. It might even be helpful to put an “at work” sign on the door to make it perfectly clear you need to be left alone.

Incidentally, eliminating distractions also relates to the virtual domain, so it’s a good idea to turn off notifications from Twitter, Slack, and other messaging platforms.

Divide up Your Time

This step is important because it allows you to be more productive than you would otherwise be. In most cases, when people work from home, it’s hard to keep a strict 9-to-5 schedule, especially with homeschooling duties and other domestic challenges to deal with. More important is to create a plan about how you’ll go about accomplishing your schedule of tasks in the time you have available. And an ideal place to keep such a schedule is the large open canvas of a whiteboard painted wall. Here you can record all the activities you need to complete in a given day, week, or month, and easily change the entries when necessary by erasing and rewriting. The great size of a whiteboard wall allows you to mark all the activities on your schedule in large print, making them easier to see and interact with. Although, according to psychologists, large lettering is not necessarily an aid to memory, unusually shaped and hard-to-read lettering is, so you can use an odd writing style when putting items on your agenda to help you remember exactly what to do and when to do it. Recent studies have shown that people recall much more material in science, history, language, and other fields when they study it in a font that’s both unfamiliar and also hard to read.

You can divide your time into chunks that cover the entire day. For example, you might create a morning chunk when you can quietly do writing projects before other family members are awake then respond to emails and texts in the same chunk of time. In the afternoon, you can make a block for doing research or participating in meetings, with each task scheduled so that they don’t interfere with other activities.

Using this approach will also make it easy to prioritize the day’s projects. If a colleague wants to have a virtual meeting, you can just offer them a time during the next chunk of your schedule. And if an unexpected task comes up, it will either need to fit into the suitable block of time in your schedule, or it will have to wait.

Keep a Time Log

Open a new spreadsheet on your laptop or desktop and write the days of the week along the top. Include half-hour blocks from 5 a.m. to 4:30 a.m. along the left side, then record what you do every day in this time log: sleep, make breakfast, work, go out on errands, etc. Do this every week, 168 hours, then archive the log, open a new spreadsheet, and keep tracking your time usage with your log. If you continue doing this, the way you think about and use your time will undoubtedly change. In fact, knowing exactly how your hours are spent each day will help you become more efficient, and you may come to realize that even in a jam-packed life, there is still space for other activities. Knowing where your time is spent will allow you to reassign segments of time from mundane pursuits such as web surfing to meaningful activities such as reading literary classics or taking up a musical instrument.

Keeping a time log can help you realize that you have the chance to ramp up your involvement in personal interests. However, the most important outcome of maintaining a log can be a newfound sense of time’s abundance, the recognition that you have a full life and have time to do what’s necessary to make it even more meaningful. Gaining this sense of time’s abundance requires only a few minutes each day to keep your log up to date.

Plan When to Quit Working

Just as important as being deliberate about how you use your time is being deliberate about when to quit working. This means no more last-minute emails or text messages. Just stop. You’ll always have plenty of work to do, but if you don’t decide when to stop working, your life will become unbalanced. You’ll keep working and won’t have enough time for other tasks such as household chores that also need to be done. Quitting work doesn’t just happen on its own, and if you wait until you’re wrapped up in a major project to try and determine where to stop, most often you won’t, and you’ll find a reason to just keep working past your designated quitting time.

As an alternative, when planning your day, decide on an exact time to quit, and when you reach that point, stop, even if you have more work to do than you did when you started. Quit, and avoid thinking about work. Then the next morning, you can make a new plan to get the rest of the work done. Just be sure that your next plan also includes a time to quit, which you can write in large letters on your whiteboard wall to help you remember.

Dry Erase Wall