Comunidad Valenciana, Spain Mar 15, 2021 (Issuewire.com) - When you live and work in the same space it’s easy for the edges to get blurred, and for boundaries to become eroded and distorted - which can have a devastating impact on well-being, productivity, and making a sustainable success of home-based working. In “Finding Your Edge: Establishing And Maintaining Boundaries When You Work From Home”, part of the Healthy Happy Homeworking series, Maya Middlemiss helps every home-based worker (whether employee or entrepreneur) to get clarity on, and protect, those essential edges.
After reaching the milestone of 20 years working from home in early 2020, Maya Middlemiss was preparing to share her hard-won wisdom with a world gradually exploring the benefits of remote work, through a big book on ‘healthy happy homeworking’. But when everything changed overnight the project was rapidly re-envisioned as a series of shorter and more tactical titles, with volume one, “Out Of The Office: Making The Transition To Working From Home”, released in November 2020 - while Middlemiss continued her work in collaboration technology journalism and remote work consultancy.
“Finding Your Edge: Establishing And Maintaining Boundaries When You Work From Home” is the second volume in the series, and explores the tricky area of those all-important dividing lines between work and the rest of our lives. Some of those boundaries are tangible and visible like those which separate our workspace and the rest of our homes, while others are much harder to pin down: task and role boundaries, start and end time, how we use technology that is shared between both domains, and of course all those boundaries which involve other people in our households and communities.
“Even when most people commuted to an office, boundaries were already becoming blurred for knowledge-workers in recent years,” Middlemiss explained. “The tools and apps we use cross the lines all the time, and there are fewer hard edges to indicate when a task or responsibility is complete.
“Once you bring that into the domestic sphere, and combine it with a growing surveillance culture and frequent management insecurities about how to supervise work effectively at a distance, it’s very easy for imbalances and stress to escalate - and for this to go unnoticed at work, until it reaches dangerous levels”.
Written for the homeworker, whether they’re an employee or self-employed entrepreneur, Finding Your Edge is designed to help individuals rethink their relationship with work and its place in their lives, and start redefining those boundaries on their own terms.
As a lasting advocate for remote work, Middlemiss has been concerned that so many people had a poor first taste of it during the lockdown periods of the pandemic and is keen to see sustainable good practice coming out of this strange period for the longer term. “Once you uncouple the work you do from a fixed location, amazing things start to happen,” she explained. “But right now, in boardrooms around the world, decisions are being made about return-to-workplace strategies which will affect millions of people.
“Working from home, working flexibly, this should all be about choice - which has been sadly lacking over the past 12 months. With Finding Your Edge and the rest of the Healthy Happy Homeworking series, I want to help people work out what they want from their lives and careers and design a lifestyle that serves their goals for the long term. And I want to empower them to speak up about what they need and want from their ‘new normality’, as enterprises and organizations work out what that’s going to look like.
“Getting those boundaries clearly in place is where it starts, and everyone deserves that - whatever industry or job they are doing.”
::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
Finding Your Edge: Establishing And Maintaining Boundaries When You Work From Home is available across the Amazon network https://geni.us/HHHFindingYourEdge
Maya Middlemiss, originally from London, lives with her family in Eastern Spain. She writes about the future of work, money, and technology, and is passionate about inclusivity and accessibility in tech adoption. Making WFH better is a big part of this, and she would be glad to provide further content and details on request.
Media Contact
BlockSparks OU (Trading as Healthy Happy Homeworking) info@healthyhappyhomeworking.com https://healthyhappyhomeworking.com
