Work-Life Balance While Working From Home? It's Possible With These Tips From Barbara Corcoran

You know, one of the greatest lessons I've ever learned from the many I've learned from you was how you structured your life. That when you were at work, that was work and you kept it clean and you delineated to your family, hey, hands off. I'm here and I'm focused on this thing. And when I'm at home, you did the same thing to your staff from work. You said, hey, hands off. I'm here. People are working under very extraordinary circumstances. How do you define those places? You know, I struggle with it myself. It was much easier to carve out spaces when I had an office to go to and a home to go home to. Now we're living at work and we're working at home. It's all blurred and it's a huge challenge for everybody. No one's having an easy time with it. So what I think I've done, which has been very helpful, is I've stopped and decided really what hours I want to work because I found myself working many more hours. Like eight, nine o'clock at night, I'm still returning messages. I'm like, what am I doing? It just blends. So I decided that my work hours from this point forward, and this happened about six weeks ago, was going to be nine in the morning till six o'clock at night. And if anything comes in after that, it would have to work till the next day, as it would if it was on your desk. I also had to separate my workspace. I was working on my kitchen counter, the hallway desk, everything. And so I realized what I needed was a huge table, which I didn't have. So I took over my bed at my home, my apartment, and I laid out all my papers to organize myself every day. So I moved to the guest room upstairs and I'm sleeping there because I needed to have that separation of space. And for my employees, I required the same. I asked everyone who's working at home, send me a photo right now of where you're going to work. What's your separated workspace? Because everyone was going to need to be productive. And even the photos that I got that were like a couple of photos were a nice desk, but they had sunglasses piled up in a jar. They had some ski equipment. I just had to clear all that up because this is a workspace. And the last and the hardest thing to do, and it took me two weeks to break the addiction, is to put your phone away when that six o'clock bell rings. Put it away and don't look at it because that phone can control you no matter how mature you are. And it took me, I know I was addicted, took me a solid two weeks to feel okay and not neurotic about doing that. You know, you just walked through so much of what I've done. I had to convert my garage so I could have a desk. I had to have a workspace and I didn't have one anymore after our fire. So I had to make one and I really needed that extra set of hours in the day, but I took it too far. I've been getting up at 4 a.m. every day. I'm taking it not only early, but I'm keeping it up late and I'm going crazy. I have to stop that. I have to put some hours on the clock. I love that. We haven't gotten to our guests yet. You're going to have to now help them. So first up is Joyce. Joyce, are you there? Yes, I'm here. Hi, Joyce. Rachel here and more importantly, Barbara there. Oh my God, you're gorgeous. Hello, Joyce. Thank you. What would you like to know? Okay. Well, first off, hello to both of you. This is so exciting. So last year I started my own business and prior to that I was used to going into an office. So even though I was working really long hours, I still had that true separation of work and personal life. So now, like many of us, I just feel like now I'm just living at work. So my question to you is how do I find a balance between running a business and having a personal life? We were just discussing this exact topic, Joyce, but I can tell from looking at you, you have energy to the moon and back. So you can work a 14-hour day and not even think about it. I would suggest really end your work day, set an alarm so it ends and make an appointment with something else, whether it be a dinner, a conversation on the phone, a Zoom call or whatever you like to do with someone else. So you stay true to yourself because you're the type that will work around the clock, I could tell. And if you have another appointment to do something fun, it's almost forced behavior. And a lot of us need that. We work on restrictions and if you have a lot of energy, it's very hard to self-restrict. So I would suggest you set an alarm as a basic and then listen to the tips we just gave.