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With offices closing their doors, and schools shutting down, more people than ever are working from home at the moment. For many, this means working full time whilst juggling cooking, cleaning and caring for children. For others it means isolation and rubbish WiFi. So how do you successfully work from home right now whilst staying productive and calm?

Woman's Hour spoke to Anna Harris - who works for a marketing and advertising agency and is homeschooling four children with her husband - and Caroline Whaley, the co-founder of coaching consultancy Shine. Here they share their best tips to help make working from home as effective and stress-free as possible.

“As wives, mothers, leaders, team-mates, friends, daughters and more, there’s a belief that we’re never good enough,” says Caroline. “We take on so many roles and expect ourselves to be great at all of them. It’s rarely helpful and certainly never more so than now.

“Let’s put that inner critic into self-isolation and give ourselves a break. Until we do that I think the pressure will just continue to mount. This is absolutely not the time to be beating yourself up for what you can’t do or be right now.”

“This whole situation is really shining a light on the unfairness of the caring responsibility falling on the women, even when they have full time work to maintain,” says Anna. “My husband and I have really carefully cultivated an environment of sharing work, and that’s really helped us.

“My husband starts work at seven and he works through until one, then I pick up at one and work through until seven. We’ve had to completely redesign the way that we’re working.”

“Split chores fairly with a schedule - you can always switch them around if some jobs are more or less popular than others,” adds Caroline. “One of my colleagues threatened to switch off the wifi for her teenage kids at the weekend if they didn’t do their bit - and it worked wonders!

“We’ve also seen lots of home-art 'Do Not Disturb' signs. If you have a vital call or a deadline to hit, enlist your household by asking for their support ahead of time so they give you the space to ensure you are not disturbed. There’s bound to be a time when you can do it for them in return if you need to.”

“Some ideas will be brilliant and a godsend for you, and some will leave you shouting, ‘It’s alright for you!’ with indignant rage,” says Caroline. “My latest rage moment was an article about the best shade of lipstick for video calls.

“If you’re expecting people to work from home, the reality is you are going to have kids in the background of video calls, or dogs popping into camera shots. If you can’t control it, do whatever you can to let it go or it will eat your energy. Don’t waste energy on what doesn’t work for you. Just adopt or adapt the good advice.”

“Taking the time to thank and appreciate someone for something they have done has an enormous impact,” says Caroline. “It could be a quick message or, even better, pick up the phone or say it in person.”

“You could take the opportunity to sit down together to eat in the evening and do a round of ‘who or what am I grateful for today?’. It doesn’t have to be something huge and significant but it does focus the mind on what is still good in our lives right now and brings positivity and energy!”

“Take a moment, grab a cup of tea and if necessary hide in the loo just long enough to come up with the one or two things you want to focus on today. You will feel so much better when you achieve them," says Caroline. "Too many people are writing epic lists which leave them feeling exhausted. A good idea is to write those 1-2 things down so you can keep them in your sights and then come back to them later.”

Anna says: “There are a lot of tips for people working from home and home-schooling which say to just get them doing school work whilst you’re working. But it doesn’t allow for the fact that they’ve got different needs at different ages,” says Anna. “This mum guilt that we usually try to keep at arm's length is really staring us in the face.

“We’ve got this marketing deluge of all these beautiful activities that we should be doing with our children, like making rainbows, but it’s completely inaccessible for so many women working from home. Normally you can ignore that kind of stuff but it’s so in-your-face at the moment that I think it’s just piling the pressure on those people who have additional caring responsibilities."

“We seem to get caught up in believing we have to do things alone,” says Caroline. “Never have we needed allies and supporters as we do now and they may be different to the ones we’re used to. What do you need and who can help you?"

“Most organisations are incredibly aware of the need to keep their teams motivated for what is likely to feel like the long-haul,” she adds. “It often takes these catalytic moments. Now is the opportunity to speak up and ask for what you need. It might be a more flexible work schedule as you support home-schooling or some help with a particular project.”

“We can level the playing field,” adds Anna. “This is an opportunity to make a new blueprint for future ways of working.”

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