Work from Home Success Program – how to avoid isolation

Work from Home Success Program Module 3, Part 2 – how to avoid isolation

If it’s so important to avoid isolation when you work from home, how much time do you need to spend outside your home office with other people?

That depends on your personality, and it’s another instance where self-knowledge makes home working much less of a struggle.

Broadly it’s all about how introvert or extrovert you are, because an extrovert gets energy from other people, whereas an introvert needs time alone to reflect on what’s been happening.

If you’re not sure, just think about how you’d like to spend an evening after a busy day’s work. The extrovert might head off to the pub, and the introvert will prefer a quiet evening in.

This self-understanding is very powerful because you can now organise your routine to suit your own preferences and habits.

Extroverts will want to get out as much as they can, and thrive on back-to-back meetings all day. An introvert needs to remember to plan trips out of the home office, and should allow time to process the conversation after a meeting, rather than heading straight into another one.

The extrovert will thrive on day events like conferences and training courses, while the more introvert are likely to find them tiring and depleting.

The business world can seem to an introvert to be geared up for extroverts, so plan a day event carefully. Check out An introvert home worker’s guide to surviving a day event for tips on how to pace yourself so you don’t end up exhausted and with a thumping headache by mid-afternoon.

And you might like to listen to Susan Cain’s popular TED talk The Power of Introverts, which has had over 12 million views, and puts the case for the quiet and contemplative in a noisy world.