The lines between work and home blur easily with most of us indulging in the work-from-home module. More often than not, we find it difficult to get our brains to stop worrying about work and be completely present at home. Many new parents also worry that their kids won’t remember anything about them because they’re stuck in front of their laptops. If you’re one of those people struggling with switching between family and work, here are some tricks you can use.

Establish a Dedicated Work Space

If you have a space that’s meant only for work, it’ll help you avoid treating your entire house as an office ground. It doesn’t have to be a fancy cabin, your working space can be a glorified closet, but it should be somewhere you can work without distractions. And when you come out, you can shut the door on your work day. This helps condition your brain, as well as your children’s brains, that the particular space is a workspace, and outside of it, you’re back to being a family man.

Build Transitions To Flip Between Modes

It’s important to have certain activities that you do to differentiate between your work time and your home time. These transitions are similar to the time that is otherwise taken up by commutes, and allows you to switch between being a family man and a working person. These transitional activities can include taking a 15-minute walk around the block or reading a chapter of a book. It’s just a way to tell your brain that you’re not at the office anymore.

Establish Rules About Working At Night

It’s common to find yourself on the couch in the middle of the night, trying to finish pending work. This mostly happens because you spend a majority of your day trying to juggle your family duties with work. To avoid this from happening every night, and to avoid suffering burnout, have a rule of how many nights a week you can spend on the couch completing your work. A maximum of three nights is more than enough.

Manage Your Notifications

The biggest culprits dragging you back to work, even after the day is over, are the notifications. You receive endless alerts throughout the day, from work to your kid’s schools, to your friends. A good way to manage the alerts is to have time pockets where you reply to the messages. Dedicate a time wherein you will reply to personal messages, and have a cut-off time after which you won’t touch your work alerts.

Today, at the bottom of the world, there is a landmass covered in ice and snow — and it’s home only to penguins, fur seals, and rich oceanic wildlife. However, it appears that this wasn’t always the case. New evidence recovered by a group of researchers proves that there was a thriving rainforest near Antarctica during the mid-Cretaceous period.

How the Evidence of an Ancient Rainforest Was Found

A team of researchers took seafloor sediment samples off the coast of West Antarctica. Within it, they discovered traces of pollen, fossilized roots, and chemical evidence of diverse plant life. Its location is less than 600 miles from the South Pole. The buried traces of vegetation allow scientists to reconstruct what the climate might have been like so many years ago. The findings were revealed by the team on the second of April in Nature. The researchers explain that the carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere were far greater then than they are now, which is the main reason why the existence of such a forest was possible in a place that doesn’t get a lot of exposure to direct sunlight.

What This Discovery Means

The discovery of the remnants of this ancient rainforest gives us a glimpse of what the conditions on Earth were like in the mid-Cretaceous period — between 83 and 92 million years ago. The annual temperatures, on average, would have been between 55°F and up to 77°F in the summer, which is quite a difference compared to the frigid temperatures of Antarctica today. Johann Klages, a marine geologist at the Alfred Wegener Institute in Bremerhaven, Germany, was part of the research team that made this discovery. He explains that, even in the mid-Cretaceous period, this part of the world saw almost no sunlight for almost four months a year. This shows the power of carbon dioxide that allowed this forest to grow and thrive.

The South Pole was largely ice-free at that time, and there was no sheet of ice to reflect the sunlight and keep the land cool. This shows us the importance of the polar ice caps when it comes to the preservation of our current world climate.