Month: June 2026

Work vs. home: No more blurred lines

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When you work at home, the lines between your work life and home life can get blurred.

You must create healthy boundaries between your work and home life in order to succeed at your work while preserving your mental health.

I have been running Fiedler Editorial from home for more than seven years, and I’ve developed some strategies for separating work and home life which I would like to share with you.

A rule I used to violate regularly and have become much better at following: Don’t check your work email on the weekends or (especially) while you are on vacation. Someone might want you urgently and expect you to be at their every beck and call. Don’t let anyone treat you that way. When you go on vacation, set your vacation responder. And don’t answer email on weekends unless you are working that weekend.

If you work on weekends, don’t do it regularly. You would hate doing that at a staff job, so why do it at home? I work on the (very) occasional weekend if there is a deadline that must be met. However, I don’t do this on a regular basis. You need your weekends to recharge.

If I am doing a tedious verification task as part of my work, I might play some classical music to help me focus. However, I never play my favorite rock, pop, or dance tunes, for these would distract me terribly. Save those for when you are relaxing at home.

When you finish your work for the day, shut your laptop down and close it. Leaving it open and running increases the chances that you will start working again in the evening, when you should be taking care of yourself.

If you work at home, how do you create healthy boundaries between your work and home life?

Spring accomplishments

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So the question arises, “What have you accomplished lately?”

A fair amount, actually.

Since no scientific work came my way this spring, I edited several materials for Country Casual Teak, the furniture company for which a good friend of mine works. I don’t often say this, but I do excellent work with websites and retail materials. Perhaps I should say it more often.

The company sent me some prelive web pages to edit, and it wasn’t just the text that I examined fastidiously. Each page had various links and buttons which I checked by clicking on them and making sure they led to the correct page or site. Oftentimes, the photos of the furniture were links themselves, which also required verification.

Some of the prelive pages were to be part of the company’s portfolio, which is very important for showing how good their furniture looks in various settings. Each page showed a country club, school, museum, or other facility and was full of text, links, and buttons to be scrutinized.

I also edited advertising emails, which were sent to clients on the company’s mailing list. These were not time-intensive, but the tricky thing about them was the hover text, which is tiny text that appears when one hovers over a photo. It had better be correct, and it was my responsibility to make sure that it was.

The largest project on which I worked for Country Casual Teak this spring was an eBook that was aimed at trade clients (mostly contractors and designers). The eBook consisted of 195 pages and was made up of some text, many photos, and many dimensional diagrams. Each diagram had a list of dimensions under it, and it was my job (in this case) to verify these dimensions by checking those on each item’s web page. Somewhat tedious, yes, but very necessary for those thinking of purchasing the furniture.

So…lots of exercises in accuracy. And I wouldn’t want it any other way.