A New Year and a new opportunity to review your home working approach, habits and routine. Grab a notebook and pen, taking a few minutes to reflect, review and start afresh. Check out the list below to get ready to reset old habits, adopting to new behaviour that will last for the whole year!

Pinpoint the action areas - with your pen and paper at the ready, start by asking yourself this question: “ What areas do I need to improve in my home working practice”. Top areas for improvement include: self-care, work-life-balance and staying socially connected during working from home. Next, read these top 5 steps to adopting new habits in home working.

1. Create new habits through FULL calendar management- to adopt new habits, we need to lead with managing our calendar and schedule. Mastering calendar management with a 360 degree view of our whole life is paramount i.e. including start time, end time, breaks, lunch time, reminders for self-care appointments etc. Ensure your include your downtime by blocking weekends, lunch times etc. Utilise reminders, notifications and blocking functionality fully. Practice this in your first week back to work and also be scheduling in the calendar planing time itself. See a sample here >>

2. Mimic the commute with more emphasis - lots has been reported about how important it is to start and end the work days with a healthy routine, and how that can support work-life-balance. During the winter months, with dwindling light, if can be more difficult to stick to this. Now that there is more light each evening from January, you have no excuse! So, grab those walking shoes and get outside for a walk before and after work. You know it is the best part of your day! Ensure you add this new habit to your calendar scheduling also :)

3. Enhance your self-care, including short activities - need to extend your concept of self-care? We often have a limited view of what self-care is or don’t understand what it means specifically to us. Self-care is so personal, some people enjoy gardening, others find they unwind via DIY. What works for you? Exactly? Create a list of self-care activities that you can access easily. Use descriptions and be specific. Ensure you also focus on small activities like; listening to a piece of music, reading a chapter of a book or a magazine article, colouring a section of a page, walking into our garden to stretch, doing a household chore etc. Read more here >>

4. Micro-moments with movement really matter - many workers in the working from home setting stay glued to their computer screen or feel stuck at their workspaces. To separate fully, we need to intentionally move away from the screen and work space. That includes moving into a different room for our 5 minute breaks, or at a very minimum move away from our work space. Consciously disconnecting from technology during our breaks supports a healthier approach to our time during work. This needs to be considered and planned PRIOR to each work day, to ensure you know exactly what to move to do, when your scheduled break time arrives. (I believe in this recommendation so much, I launched a free ebook on it, find it here >>)

5. Clock in and out, to demarcate better - have you a tendency to over-work? Noticing that you are logging back on and checking mails in the evening or at the weekend. Already tried tried turning off notifications, covering or locking away your work station? How about creating a simple log-in and log-out printed page for your work week which sits on your workspace or even on the door to your workspace ? This habit achieves two things, it records your start and end time, ensuring you are aware of when you start and finish work. Also, it means that over a week, you can notice total hours and also become more conscious of any additional hours that you may try to sneak in! Establish this habit is a super trick to avoid over-working!

Want to talk through your plan directly with a Remote Work expert? RoRemote has partnered with Laya Healthcare to offer 1-2-1 direct consultations for Laya clients. You can find out more about this personalised service here >>