This is an I-Heart podcast.

Good morning. This is Laura.

Welcome to the new corner office, the podcast where we share strategies for thriving in the new world of work, where location and hours are more flexible than in the past.

Today's tip is about how to handle weekend work without, well, completely losing your weekend.

One of the hazards of working from home is losing the boundaries between work and the rest of life.

A lot of people have discovered this over the past few months.

One survey from JDP found that of people newly working from home,

a majority reported working on nights and weekends more frequently.

Sometimes this is because people's managers don't observe boundaries, but other times it's because, well, hey, you're already at your workplace.

It seems easy enough to get caught up on email.

You have downtime when you'd otherwise be watching TV, and so, well, that's fine.

I track my time, and I know that I often work on weekends.

My weekdays can be interrupted. And if my kids are busy on weekends, well, time is time. However, you might want to be a little judicious about it. So here's how to work from home on weekends without spending your entire weekend working at home. First, make yourself a very clear priority list. Don't work just to work. What do you hope to get done before Monday morning? Weekends can be a good time for longer-term or speculative

projects, or if you're behind because of a midweek emergency, they can also help you stay on track.

But you won't get through a

1,000 email backlog over a weekend, so don't set that as a goal. Maybe just return anything you

intend to return from the last week, and let anything before that go. On a recent weekend,

after returning from a few weeks at the beach, my weekend goal was to record 10 short podcast episodes. When I was done, I was done.

Second, give yourself a window for doing these tasks. This serves a few purposes. First, work expands to fill the available space. We're more efficient when space is more limited.

Second, it keeps work from always being an option.

That way you don't feel guilty when you relax or hang out with your family.

There's a time for work, namely, Sunday evening from 4 to 7 p.m.

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