Maintaining work/life balance in an unusual holiday season

For many people, the next day or so will be their last working day of 2020 before taking a break over Christmas and the end of the year.

Like so much in 2020, though, that break will not be like other years. Where I live, in the UK, there are still restrictions on travel, hospitality and social interaction, and while some of these rules will be relaxed briefly over Christmas, we will still need to exercise caution.

How should we spend our holiday time, then, when we can’t do much of what we would normally do?

First, of course, we should be grateful that we are still employed and that we can take a holiday at all (and think of how we can help others who are not so fortunate).

Second, I think we should make the most of lessons which we have learnt from this unusual year - particularly about how we keep space for ourselves and space for work. Throughout this year, I have learnt the importance of adopting habits and routines which create some form of demarcation between these spaces.

This has been unusual for me: I enjoy my job, enjoy interacting with the people I work with and, before the pandemic, thought that I didn’t impose a particularly strong boundary between work and home. I thought that it was normal (and okay) to check emails on my phone in the evening, to schedule calls at unusual times, to travel often and to operate in different timezones, and to work on documents and ideas whenever it seemed convenient.

However, working from home for many months has made me realise that, in my pre-pandemic life, I had all sorts of unconscious markers which drew a boundary between work and home. Most obviously, when I was at home I was physically at home, and when I was at work I was (usually) physically in an office. When I was at work, I was surrounded by devices that would ping for my attention when someone needed me; when I was at home I made a choice to check my emails or messages.

While I have been continuously working from home, the boundary has been physically blurred, and it has often been easy to never quite stop working. In the early days, I kept wondering why I was so tired at the end of the day and the end of the week - until I realised that, because of this blurred boundary, the day never quite finished and the week never quite stopped. I had to learn to create some boundaries - some boundaries in my diary, such as going for a walk ‘to work’ in the morning, and ‘to home’ in the evening, some boundaries in my habits, such as making myself a promise not to check emails too frequently at the weekend, and some boundaries in my activities, such as deliberately finding things to do outside work hours to make the time periods feel different. I know that many people have adopted similar mechanisms.

As we go on holiday, many of us now look forward to several days of relaxation, but also days without habits and routines - or even many of the traditions which we would like to follow at this time of year. Paradoxically, even though we are on holiday, it will be easy to let boundaries blur again. I think it is important that we approach those days with a determination not to pick up too much work - or at least not normal work which we could do on any day in the office.

I know myself well enough to know that, after a few days of relaxation, I will start to get ideas about work, and will start to feel itchy and impatient to write them down and put them into practice. I think that’s fine - as long as I choose to do the things which I find engaging and energising, and don’t just spend time trying to clear an email backlog. Space to think and develop ideas is an important part of holidays - at least for me. But I am going to try to develop those ideas in a workspace away from email, to give myself a break, and to give those ideas room to grow.

This is what I hope will work for me, but, like so much this year, it will be a process of discovery. However it goes, I hope to stay safe, stay sensible, use technology to connect with friends and family remotely, keep patient and keep hoping - and to enjoy an unusual and unique holiday season as much as possible. I hope that you can too, and wish everyone all the best wishes of the season.