Matthew

Maintaining a healthy work-life balance was difficult enough when we had to get up every day and physically travel to the office. Now that many of us are working from home, it can seem almost impossible.

When your home is the same setting for both work and life, it’s easy for the line between the two to get a little blurry. If home is your office and you’re always home, without clear boundaries it can start to feel like you’re always at the office.

Today, we’re going to share a few tips, tricks and ways to maintain a healthy balance between work and life while working at home.

Morning Routine

Start your morning with a routine that has nothing to do with work. Dedicating the beginning of your day to self-care can help you start it on the right foot. It sends a signal to yourself and those around you about what your true priorities are.

Here are a few things you might want to ritualize before you start grinding your working gears for the day:

Prepare a nutritious breakfast with a delicious coffee.
Perform a brief exercise routine to stretch your body and get your blood flowing.
Leave your phone behind, and let your mind wander while you go for a short walk.
Have a soothing morning shower accompanied by your favorite playlist or podcast.
If you’re working with children at home, put your phone on silent and spend some time catching up with them.

No Work Emails in Bed

Make it a rule that work and bed will never touch. Even if you love checking your social media as soon as you wake up, stay away from your work accounts at least until your feet touch the floor.

Now that your work laptop is literally just a few feet away, you may even want to ask yourself, “Do I really need my work email connected to my phone?” If you can’t think of a good reason to keep your work a few inches from you at all times, instead of a few feet, try deleting the work email app on your phone.

Just like you wouldn’t dream of bringing your home life to the office, you don’t need to bring the office to bed. Designate your bed and a few other spaces in your home as hallowed temples of living where work may not enter.

Separate Space

The same way that watching Netflix or cooking breakfast in the office seems to cheapen it, bringing work into your home can dilute your home life. Even if your work and your life are technically in the same building now, putting some kind of token physical barrier between the two will help you to separate them in your mind.

Designate a specific office space in your home that you only use to focus on work. Even if you use a corner of another room, it’s helpful to demarcate the space in a way that signals a change of atmosphere. Once you’ve made a special office-land in your home, don’t go anywhere near it when you’re not working.

Start and End

There are a lot of downsides of physically going to work, but we think having specific start and end times isn’t one of them. Now that you’re working from home, bring those clearly defined time limits with you.

Set an alarm or write your future self a post-it note telling them when to quit. Give yourself clear boundaries with an understanding that if you haven’t finished something by quitting time, you can finish it tomorrow.

Without solid start and end times, it’s easy to find work creeping into parts of your life where it is unwanted. Give yourself time to focus on your kids, your hobbies, your friends and your personal well-being by making a home work schedule and sticking to it.

Lunch Break

Back when you used to go to work, you probably also used to take a break around midday for lunch. Maybe you ate lunch while you met with clients, or maybe you picked up a sandwich and got lost in your thoughts. We think taking a break around the halfway point and changing activities is an idea you should take home with you.

Your lunch break is like a comma in the middle of a long sentence. It allows you take a breath and pause for a second to reset and recharge so you can come back and finish with renewed energy. It also gives you something to look forward to during the difficult first half of the work day.

Retrofit Your Meeting Space

If you regularly meet with your work colleagues at your home, whether in person or on a video call, make sure the space or background is oriented toward work. Just like bringing work emails to bed can muddy your life balance, having your kids’ dirty clothes in the background of a work call can muddy your work balance.

Try to minimalize the personal items that you keep in your work meeting space. Take hobby items like your guitar or your pool table out of the picture. A few photos of your family won’t hurt, but try to surround yourself mostly with office-related trappings.

Exercise Routine

When you had to leave the house to go to work, you probably found it easier to add other out-of-house activities like going to the gym. Now that you’re at home all day, your fitness routine may be in the lost-and-found drawer.

Set aside a specific time of day when you commit to getting some exercise. This may be easy if you’re fascinated by some sport or other physical activity, but if not, you can reward yourself for doing the difficult thing anyway. Make a rule that you can only watch your favorite show or eat that chocolate chip cookie if you’ve completed your exercise routine for that day.

Have a Life!

The best way to keep your work-life balance is to plan post-work life activities that you love doing, and then do them. If you find your work is taking up too much space in your head, start learning something interesting that isn’t work related, or take up a hobby that fascinates you.

If you’re working with children at home, just as important as keeping them out of your work area is including them after the work day is over. Doing something with your children that you enjoy is the best way to keep unwelcome work thoughts out of your head.

When you have an interesting life to get back to after work, it will be much easier to stop working at the end of the day. Work hard when you work, but then stop, put your work down and enjoy your life.

Having an in-depth understanding of liquor liability is one of the ways of gaining tips on how to avoid claims. The salient factor about such liability is the insurance part. Therefore when discussing liability as regards liquor, it is almost impossible to do so without indulging in liquor liability insurance. The aforesaid insurance cover is among the most important covers that anyone who is in the business of selling or producing liquor can hold. The common definition given to liquor liability insurance is; a coverage whose role is to help in the compensation of an injured party whose injuries resulted from an intoxicated person who is a client of the policyholder or whose intoxication is as a result of the liquor offered by the policyholder.

Does the Federal Government Have Uniformity on Liquor Laws?

The liability of parties whereby a third party sustains injuries stemming from the actions of an intoxicated persons vary from one state to another. Therefore, in the event, an injured party institutes a compensation claim, the factors, legal provisions and evidence that will be taken into account might be different from the ones another state puts into account. Simply put, liquor laws vary from one state to another. Hence such laws are some of the very many laws that the federal republic has left to the discretion of individual states.

The Legal Framework Regulating Liability as Regards Liquor

Dram Laws

The term dram shop is not familiar to most people despite several people having visited one before. A dram shop defined is a commercial establishment that deals in the selling of alcohol, e.g. a bar, tavern etc… Dram laws defined are laws that impose liability on the mentioned establishments in the event of an injury caused by their patrons. The best example is where an intoxicated patron goes ahead and causes a car crash resulting in serious bodily harm or fatal injuries to a third party. In such a scenario, the mentioned law will come into effect to hold the commercial establishment responsible for selling alcohol to the patron that caused the accident.

States That Have Enacted Dram Shop Liability Laws

Currently, a total number of 44 states in the US have in place dram shop liability statutes whose sole intention is to extend the liability of injuries occasioned by a patron to a third party to the dram shop. Some states put dram shops to their defense regardless of the facts at hand. In such a scenario, for the dram shop to avoid liability they have the mandate to show to the court or prosecuting authority that the patron in question was not intoxicated in their premises or they did not appear intoxicated while at the shop.

In other states, the mandate to proof that the dram shop was the source of the intoxication is upon the claimant. Further, the claimant will have to prove that the injuries sustained resulted from the intoxication of the subject patron. It is important also to take note that some homeowners insurance policies also cover liability as regards liquor to a certain extent, usually between $100 000 and $300 000.

Laws on ‘Bring Your Own Bottle’ Establishments

Bring your own bottle establishments to have in recent times been on the rise. One dilemma that most people battle with is understanding the extent of the liability of such establishments in the event a patron dining with them injures a third party. Well, when it comes to such establishments, there is an exception to the extent of their liability. For the establishments that are not in the business of selling liquor but provide patrons with a place to come with their own drink and enjoy, then such establishments can not be held liable for the injuries caused to a third party by their patrons. It is highly advisable that such establishments expressly state the kind of service they offer to avoid liability.

It is important to note that there is great importance that has been placed on responsible drinking. Therefore even insurance companies from time to time will offer discounts to policyholders that contribute to the responsible drinking campaign through educating both their employees and patrons on the importance of drinking responsibly.

How to Reduce Risk of Liability Claims

While most liquor establishments hope that their patrons will avoid any injury-causing actions, still some patrons might end up causing injury hence subsequent liability on the establishment. Therefore every commercial establishment selling liquor must ensure it holds liability insurance.

Here are some of the ways through which commercial liquor establishments can reduce the risk of liability claims:

Instituting Policies & Procedures

A good number of commercial liquor establishments have policies & procedure that has to be adhered to by both employees and patrons. Policies like no entry for patrons without IDs and not serving liquor to already intoxicated patrons have in most instances, helped such establishments avoid liability.

Employee Training

Owners and the managerial team of commercial liquor establishments should at all times ensure that their staff are properly trained. Enrolling your employees for classes like liquor serving safety class, Training for Intervention Procedures, commonly known as TIPS e.t.c, can help in the reduction of liability.

Insurance

Insurance coverage for liability as regards liquor is one of the ways of reducing risk. Alcohol is likely to impair a patron’s judgement and subsequently end up becoming aggressive against a third party. Therefore even after involving all risk-reducing measures, always ensure that your dram shop has the right insurance coverage.

Interested in learning more? Check out our Liquor Liability Product Page & Speak With An Agent Today

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CityScape Insurance, LLC have used their best efforts in preparing this website resource. CityScape Insurance, LLC makes no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this webpage and specifically disclaims any implied definitions and/or usage implied usage within. The accuracy and completeness of the information provided are not guaranteed or warranted to produce any particular results. Neither the publisher nor author shall be liable for any loss of profit or any other personal or commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damage.

How To Balance Work & Life While Working From Your Living Room Office