5 Rules For A Healthy Marriage While Working From Home (With Your Spouse)

Tips For Working From Home With Your Spouse

You and your spouse may be on different schedules and your careers may crashing into one another, but separate yourselves and become successful again!
What do you do when you and your wife or husband share the house while working during the day?

Here are 5 ground rules to help you become successful at home, while your other-half benefits as well.

1. Claim your ground!

When working from home, it is important to develop a space that is identified to the whole household as YOUR office area. Whether that is in the kitchen, living room, or a separate room, this space should be private and quiet.

By establishing this space, you are establishing these grounds with your wife, husband, and or children, and this will avoid distractions throughout the day. Your spouse should also claim their own space.

2. Hours of Operation

One of the benefits from working at home is the flexible time, but don’t let your schedule change according to other’s requests. Only accept your partner’s invitation to lunch, or a request for doing the laundry if your work schedule allows it.

It is often a good idea to map out your office hours before your day starts, so that you can make an appropriate time for lunch and other planned priorities.

Make your office hours visible to your family; this way they can see when you're busy or not, and naturally respect your partner’s hours of operation as well.

3. Talk To Each Other (Communication)

Communication is the key! State what needs to be done, or talked about, and then find the appropriate time to follow it up.

While you are married, and not clients, the planned times to communicate can be related to appointments. Ground rules; don’t miss your appointment! Take advantage of this time with your partner to stay focused on your personal life before returning to your office frame-of-mind.

4. Turn On And Turn Off

When you are working, work! When you are done working, relax!

It is very important for you and your spouse to develop these boundaries.

Focus while you are working, and ask your partner to respect this so that you do not have to stop writing an email just because they walked in the room.

During 'work-hours' it should be appropriate for you to continue a conference call, instead of answering your partners call. Asking them to help you achieve this goal is the best way to approach it.

5. Trust and Reliability

You and your spouse should trust each other enough to know that when you are doing something, it is important! It should come as no insult to your partner that you cannot talk at that moment.

You also need to establish the trust with your family, that they will not watch TV or talk on their phone beside you when they know you need quiet.

Rely on each other to create a suitable environment. If your problem is kids, take frequent scheduled breaks so that you bug them, before they bug you! :-)