With the country now going on two months of widespread lockdowns, millions of people are now doing their jobs from home. As an amusing novelty gives way to banal reality, CNN Business reminds people that burnout can happen both in and out of the office. This is especially the case when people are dealing not only with work stress but the overall anxiety of this global pandemic that has come to absorb even the most mundane aspects of our everyday lives.

Chief among the issues is that of work-life balance. When telecommuting, there's no real physical separation between work space and home space, particularly if one lives in a one-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn where the phrase "home office" has become a darkly amusing redundancy.  A report from last month found that, based on global network usage, people in the United States are working an average of three extra hours per day.

These results are in line with previous research about the effects of remote work. Psychologists have found that telecommuting can erode the barrier between work and home life, as people lack the physical and psychological separation between these two domains that exists in a traditional office setting. This has meant that obligations tend to extend beyond the traditional workday, interrupting family time and preventing teleworkers from ever truly disconnecting. A poll last year of about 500 people found that remote employees work about 1.4 days more per month than those at the office; similar findings in 2013 by Gallup found that remote workers log in about four more hours per week than those who work at an office.

CNN Business said it's important to set consistent work hours and to have some sort of signal to indicate the work day is over, such as taking a shower, changing clothes, or working out. If one has the luxury of more than one device, another trick that works (kind of) well for certain Trusted Professional writers is dedicating that all work be done on one computer while all leisure be done on the other. When the workday ends, closing the work laptop and turning on the home desktop can go a long way in providing that mental transition, though, depending on the intensity of the day, this doesn't always work.