Do this tonight to separate work and home life

Amy Shearn
Forge
Published in
2 min readMar 12, 2021

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🍵 Today’s tip: This five-senses ritual will shut down the workweek and welcome the weekend.

To paraphrase an old adage, it’s never too late in a pandemic to start a new ritual — especially if it’s one that will make your 5pm work-from-home shutdown feel legit. As Sophie Lucido Johnson puts it in Forge, “you need a boundary between your work life and your home life.”

Here, according to Johnson, is what you need to do:

Turn your phone on airplane mode. Put on music that calms you. Set a timer for one hour, and heat up a big cup of herbal tea. Wrap yourself in the coziest blanket. Listen to the songs, smell the tea, and slowly rub some nice-smelling lotion into your hands. Just think about how nice all those things feel in your body. Don’t worry about thinking about anything else.

Obviously you don’t have to follow all these steps — maybe you hate tea, or maybe you live with children who don’t get the concept of an hour of calm — but it’s a good template to start with. You’ll achieve a sense of work-life balance and you’ll smell nice, to boot.

⚖️ More from Forge on maintaining work-life balance:

A Real Response to “How Do You Achieve Work-Life Balance?”
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What to Ask Yourself Before You Commit to Anything
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Use the “Four Burners” Theory for Better Work-Life Balance
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Amy Shearn
Forge

Formerly: Editor of Creators Hub, Human Parts // Ongoingly: Novelist, Essayist, Person