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With remote working becoming increasingly popular, there is a danger that employees can start blurring their working and personal lives together, particularly if they work from home.
To prevent this from happening, employers could supply their staff with box files they can use to separate their work-related documents from the usual paperwork found in the house, such as household bills and personal bank statements.
Dr Clare Kelliher, senior lecturer in strategic human resource management at Cranfield School of Management, suggested that work has actually become more intense in recent years, despite a report last week finding the average working week now stands at 36.3 hours, down from 38.1 hours in 1992.
"That's not just about longer working hours but also about people working harder during the time that they're at work. That may be in part [because] people are compressing what they do into shorter amounts of time," she commented.
"Having said that, there is in some sense a difficulty associated with measuring hours, particularly when you talk about managerial and professional workers. With various communication technologies, work doesn't tend to start at the workplace and finish when they leave."
With the advent of technology like BlackBerries and iPhones, many people work outside of their regular salaried hours by writing emails over the weekend or taking calls in the evening.
"Certainly the research we've done at Cranfield would suggest that particularly managerial and professional workers are working in different ways - the boundaries between work and non-work life are much less clear, and are interspersed with different activities," Dr Kelliher said.
"[There] are lots of examples of the boundaries between work and non-work activities becoming blurred."
To distinguish between work and personal time, employees who work from home could use wall planners to mark out clearly when they are being paid to work and when they can take a break.