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Why Working For Yourself Has Become the New Norm

Over the past few months, since the Coronavirus outbreak swept the globe, many of us have been gifted with the intangible, fleeting, priceless, gift of time. With this, we have been able to reevaluate our lives to an extent most of us didn’t think was possible. Considering our relative happiness, our careers, our relationships, and our impact on the environment were all themes that came up.

Soon after we stopped scratching our heads and were able to move past the fear and uncertainty, this time provided us with novel clarity and focus. We were able to peel back the layers that are normally tightly bound by our restrictive schedules and ask ourselves if the system in place, the standard 9-5 office workday was what we really needed. If it was what we wanted, even. For many, after the initial shock and daunting task of creating our own daily schedules passed, we came to the conclusion that crafting our individualized work/life balance actually worked in our favor.

With so many aspects of our working life laid out on the table to be rearranged and reimagined, we were able to finally envisage our new norm. To outline the clear benefits and perks of becoming our own boss. Yet, to effectively transition from a formal salary job into a more flexible freelance career or startup position is not exactly a cakewalk. It takes countless hours of hard work, overtime, and other undiscovered sacrifices along the way. However, over time we’ll come to experience how the risks are well with the rewards. Here are some of the main reasons why working for yourself has become the new norm.

Make Your Day Work For You

When you work freelance (or simply removed from the 9-5 parameters) your day suddenly opens up to potentialities, changes to your working environment, and makes room for added meetings, activities, and exercise that will keep your mind, body, and spirit in balanced harmony. Crafting your own schedule allows you to feel your way into the workday and discover how to integrate work around your natural sleep schedule, your family dynamic, children’s extracurriculars, or your physical necessities. Subscribing to a one-size-fits-all routine can detract from your happiness, health, and emotional relationships. What’s more, if you make your own working hours, you can choose to grind during odd hours of the day rather than sacrificing peak daylight hours that every human needs to thrive. Working for yourself, either from home or at a communal workspace such as a WeWork, you can still maintain solid focus and productivity. The only difference is that you stop adhering to someone else’s version of what’s right for you and your internal functions.

Frosted glass sliding door divides living room space

Open Opportunity to Develop Personal Projects

By setting your own parameters and schedule, it is much easier to reserve time for creative endeavors, personal projects, or physical goals. The nine to five schedule makes it difficult for people to delve into actualizing personal goals or careers because the day simply doesn’t afford the time needed to develop these projects. It’s easy to become discouraged from developing a startup, or crafting a home-grown business when the forty-hour workweek takes the majority of the day. Even holding a secondary job such as a yoga instructor, a tutor, or even a painter, can feel impossible when commuting to work every day of the workweek. By integrating work into your home, you can effectively work freelance, maintain the same perks of a well-paying job, but not sacrifice your life schedule.

Ditch the Commute!

The main fear most people encounter when deciding to work freelance or not is the concern of not having an available home office. While this understandably poses a problem, there are few helpful spatial solutions to integrate to give yourself that needed office environment, without compromising your interior aesthetic. Consider integrating glass room dividers into a corner of your home that happens to have extra unused space. Glass wall partitions, in particular, are a super breezy and stylish way to create separation between two distinct spaces. Without sacrificing your artistic interiors, you can install sliding glass barn doors to effectively achieve that rustic look with a modern twist, all while integrating real walls for your new home office! Making sure you have a productive working environment will make all the difference when adopting a freelance, startup lifestyle.

With all of the added benefits of being your own boss, creating your own work schedule, and making your workday work for you, hopefully, you’ll have enhanced inspiration moving forward out of the COVID 19 crisis. For more inspiration and space optimizing solutions, don’t hesitate to check out the best sliding closet doors, tri-fold dividers, sliding room dividers, and spatial solutions offered at The Sliding Door Company. Visit Us Online to browse our online viewing catalog and Enjoy A Free Consultation from one of our team members to actualize your vision today!

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Pandemic Safety and Your Business

After about three months of uncertainty, job loss, strain, and discomfort, we are now finally starting to see a shift in the current pandemic outcome. With a national decline in cases and deaths,  there has been a large push to restimulate the economy as best we can, come out of hiding so to speak, and make attempts at putting the pieces back together, with the tools we have left. However, despite the inherent necessity for jobs and work, many remain skeptical if these advances are premature, and more importantly, if they are putting everyone at risk. Without adequate testing and controlled isolation of those carrying the virus, it is exceedingly dangerous to assume that this will simply just disappear with time. On a global scale, the way we live, interact, do business, and provide services, will never be the same. International trade will evolve and require strict standards and safety precautions, the food and beverage industry will see unprecedented requirements and regulations in order to operate, and most businesses can expect to see fewer customers, and will be asked to take enhanced measures in order to safeguard visitors.

So, as a business owner, you now become rightfully bestowed with the responsibility to protect and provide a safe environment for your customers, patrons, and clients. Now, if you’re like most Americans, you may be wondering what these accommodations look like. What the financial strain these new “conditions” may have on your business, and how to implement social distancing tactics without compromising your vision. How does one go about increasing security while creating distance in socially close spaces? How can a business work within the new normal and still stay afloat? Below we have a few recommendations on how to not only keep your business running throughout these difficult times but also how to ensure the public that your establishment is a non-threat to their health and safety.

Create Distance With Smart Spatial Solutions

We are starting to see businesses of all kinds and sizes integrate wall partitions, room dividers, and alone tri-fold dividers into their waiting areas, and throughout vast open floor plans in order to create safer environments for workers and customers alike. Not just commercial businesses, but educational institutions, libraries, and restaurants are now also starting to utilize wall partitions and room dividers. These easy-to-install glass partitions can effectively create additional spatial separation and enhanced safety within indoor environments. Being the owner of any establishment or facility, you should consider making use of the available spatial solutions, and start to integrate glass room partitions, sliding room dividers, and other easy-to-clean glass space dividers throughout your business to create enhanced separation and safety. Decreasing the amount of foot traffic and potential contact between visitors and employees is a crucial step in a safer business. One of the most noteworthy benefits of glass walls is their antimicrobial surface. Staff can easily clean and disinfect within seconds, being that glass walls are resistant to damage and water, and are not porous like acrylic surfaces. Our glass walls are conveniently offered in a wide range of glass opacities, from completely opaque, to see-through transparent. They require no construction and take less than hours to be installed by our team of professional installers, making this one solution that won’t break the bank or cost your business weeks of cumbersome construction.

Limit Capacity and Encourage Face Coverings

By limiting your business’s overall intake capacity, you can safeguard everyone involved. By choosing to half your normal capacity, you effectively create increased distance and reduce the chance of person-to-person contact. This keeps the indoor air quality much fresher and allows visitors the peace of mind they’re looking for. Additionally, by requiring face coverings within businesses that allow for it, you can create a healthier environment and protect against airborne viral spreading.

Mandate Employees and Workers to Comply With Enhanced Safety Standard

While this may take a bit of initial work to develop new standards and regulations for employees and staff to follow, the benefits are well worth the work. Stay up to date on all the latest health recommendations from the CDC to understand what the most effective methods for controlling the spread of viral disease and sickness are, as well as learn more about sanitation standards and cleaning necessities. Once you have everyone on board and in the know, it will be much easier to control and regulate these new practices moving forward. Owning a business will also require you to think of ways that can allow customers to enter and exit your establishment with the least amount of contact. Limit the need for your patrons and employees to physically touch door handles, menus, and other such communal things that could hold germs and harmful bacteria. Ask your staff to continuously sanitize, deep clean, and disinfect all surfaces and communal items to ensure the cleanest working environment possible.

Enclosed glass corner office with modern sliding doors

For more inspiration and space-optimizing solutions, don’t hesitate to check out the best glass wall partitions, sliding glass barn doors, and spatial solutions offered at The Sliding Door Company. Our in-store locations are not available during this time, so please do Visit Us Online to browse our online viewing catalog and Enjoy A Free Consultation from one of our team members to actualize your vision today!

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How to Self-Construct A Home Office During COVID 19

The past two months have been a complete whirlwind of emotions, uncertainties, and swift transitions since Coronavirus hit U.S. shores in February. Starting with a crash course on how to adapt to quickly changing landscapes, the virus later spurred the birth of new routines, taught us how to order our entire lives online, and more than anything- COVID 19 has forced us all to spend an unprecedented amount of time at home. For anyone still holding a job, or those able to do remote work, having a space at home that allows for concentration and productivity has been an absolute god-send. Though, if you’re like most stay-at-home workers, your “home office” situation might look a little different than the executive suite we all dream of. Tired of roughing it amongst the battlezone of children, pets, and loud neighbors? Wishing you had a peaceful work sanctuary right about now? Well, here are four simple tricks and tips for transforming your home interiors into a Pinterest-worthy, envy-invoking dream office. Warning: you may never want to return to work ever again.

Enclosed frosted glass corner home office with modern sliding doors

Step #1: Find the Ideal Atmosphere

If an empty room is not available, no worries! Creating a home office out of thin air is essentially what glass wall partitions and sliding room dividers were made for. When setting out to determine your in-house office “location”, take into consideration the available natural light, the surrounding noise contributors, the amount of foot traffic that area gets, as well as the space’s functionality within your home. Once you’ve picked out your little slice, set about visualizing where you’ll need your walls to be installed, or a room divider to be placed.

Step #2: Craft A Room From Nothing

Next, you must decide what kind of room partition/dividers your space would benefit from best. This all depends on the type of home you have, your children or roommate situation, and your available space. With so many options, ranging from different glass opacities, and handle types, to accessories, frames, and overall design, you’ll be able to find an option that integrates into the rest of your home flawlessly. After picking and installing super easy to set up temporary glass walls (or glass room dividers) you’ll have a better idea of the actual square footage you’re working with. If your home is designed with a natural “nook” somewhere within the living room, use that floorplan to install a sliding glass barn door, or a floor to ceiling room divider that provides the privacy you crave while maintaining an artistic flourish. You can then envision what you can fit into your new office, what supplies you’ll need, how to decorate it, and what to perhaps abandon out of necessity.

Fixed privacy wall for partitioning and people seating in the chairs while waiting

Step #3: Spiff It Up

Any office, be it at home or within a real office building, should feel inviting enough to encourage a productive workflow. The days of fluorescent lighting, rows of grey cubicles, no natural light, and an overall depressive atmosphere are long over. Now that you have the pleasure of working from home, which luckily, excludes the once cumbersome commute, you have the opportunity to design your office however you like. Everything from artistic lamps, to thoughtful wall art, the perfect height desk, and a comfortable chair will make all the difference when curating your office’s interior design. And if you’re feeling a bit extra, introduce some relaxing air purifiers and beautiful houseplants to add that sanctuary feel to your new study. If the space allows, you may even consider painting one of the walls to introduce a lively pop of color and emotion to your space. Luckily, the ball is in your court when crafting your idyllic home office. 

dental office with glass room dividers

Step #4: Sit Back, Relax and Get Back to The Grind

Now that your exciting “executive suite” is all set up and ready to be utilized, take a few moments to appreciate your hard work and soak in the freedom of a balanced work/home life. How rare it is, the opportunity to spend more time with your loved ones, enjoy your beautiful home throughout all hours of the day and work in your pj’s. To retire that daily commute and the tiring politics of an office environment and be able to just sink into your projects. So, take that necessary moment to feel gratitude for your situation, and then get back to it!

With the above tips and tricks, your new home office could be an absolute breeze to set up. For more inspiration and space-optimizing solutions, don’t hesitate to check out the best glass wall partitions, sliding glass barn doors, and spatial solutions offered at The Sliding Door Company. Our in-store locations are not available during this time, so please do Visit Us Online to browse our online viewing catalog and Enjoy A Free Consultation from one of our team members to actualize your vision today!